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Post by Deleted on Apr 26, 2013 13:51:57 GMT -5
Yes that's why I mentioned it. Typically with 'effortless meditation' where attention generally comes back to the raw sensations but generally shifts around and does what it does without intervention, I do relax and the mind gets very slowed down. The quickness of breath and increased energy came when I noticed that there was a constant unchanging observing going on -- an angle sort of back behind the sensory stuff. When attempting to observe that observing, back perspective, the increased energy and breathing rate happened. It was odd because I hadn't noticed the observing before and so it was sort of new. Maybe the increased respiration was related to excitement over something new. Or maybe it was because I was getting tangled up in some sort of subtle conception. We are the 99.999%! Heheh, sounds like your mind said "In the calm water I am beginning to see something, let me shift around and narrow my attention to look at it, OH CRAP the water is choppy now..." Yes I wondered about that. But as you're pointing out in another post, what is seeing that observing perspective? It's like there are three friggin things going on: perceptual stuff, an observing, then a noticing of the observing and perceptual stuff. It's on the last one that breathing started to crank. |
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Post by silence on Apr 26, 2013 14:02:40 GMT -5
Yes that's why I mentioned it. Typically with 'effortless meditation' where attention generally comes back to the raw sensations but generally shifts around and does what it does without intervention, I do relax and the mind gets very slowed down. The quickness of breath and increased energy came when I noticed that there was a constant unchanging observing going on -- an angle sort of back behind the sensory stuff. When attempting to observe that observing, back perspective, the increased energy and breathing rate happened. It was odd because I hadn't noticed the observing before and so it was sort of new. Maybe the increased respiration was related to excitement over something new. Or maybe it was because I was getting tangled up in some sort of subtle conception. For what it's worth, the increase in energy doesn't strike me as odd at all. That energy is always there but for most people it's being suppressed and distorted around the clock by thought. I'd say you've discovered what actual silence really is. It's not a lifeless blank slate. It's also not something even a fully mind identified person could even dream of controlling. It's the depth and power of life itself that reveals itself through and as the body when there's sufficient willingness to let go. |
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Post by enigma on Apr 26, 2013 21:32:38 GMT -5
In the largest sense, self IS conditioning. So conditioning doesn't run without a self. Hmm. My understanding was that the mind-body is conditioned to behave in certain ways under certain conditions. Conditioning is just the shaping of the mind-body, or programming. Given various stimuli it responds in certain ways. This is just part of life in this Universe. And in fact life is not necessary for conditioning to be present. IOW, inanimate objects can be conditioned. A stone slowly erodes under friction from water. I thought that the myth of self is based on assigning reactions due to conditioning to a self. So, even without a belief in self, reactions will continue but not dwelled on, etc. Anger will happen (due to conditioning) but not recycled (due to storytelling about the self). I don't know anything about stone conditioning, so I'll leave that alone. It's not that there are conditioned reactions, and that these reactions look like a self. It's more that the idea of a self becomes part of the conditioning. I guess we would say not all the conditioning is a self, but all of the self is part of conditioning. Reactions will happen without the belief in a self, but they will not be reactions of a supposed separate, volitional self. I took your comments about reaction to refer to an apparent self reacting. Hencely, the apparent contradiction of seeing no self and yet self reaction happening. It's natural for the creature to work toward it's own survival, and it's also natural for it to play it's role in the survival of other creatures. This doesn't imply a separate, volitional self. It just implies a fundamentally creative, nurturing intelligence at it's core. That the idea may be true, yes. Yeah, basically. Calling it a residual unconscious belief may be a way of insuring the continuation of a game. I don't think you really believe in the self so much as you want to, and so you mostly ignore the fact that there is no evidence for it, and go on with your life as though it's true. Do you plan regular trips to the unicorn ranch so that you can ride the unicorns in spite of the fact that there is no evidence that there are unicorns? If not, why is that different from acting like a separate, volitional self in spite of the fact that there is no evidence of one? |
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Post by enigma on Apr 26, 2013 21:54:51 GMT -5
Heheh, sounds like your mind said "In the calm water I am beginning to see something, let me shift around and narrow my attention to look at it, OH CRAP the water is choppy now..." Yes I wondered about that. But as you're pointing out in another post, what is seeing that observing perspective? It's like there are three friggin things going on: perceptual stuff, an observing, then a noticing of the observing and perceptual stuff. It's on the last one that breathing started to crank. I'm not sure I can follow what your experience is, but here it sounds like attention is just backing out it's focus of attention from stuff, to the observer of stuff, to the noticing of the observing. It doesn't imply multiple things going on, just an adjustment of the zoom lens. You are the one noticing everything that can be noticed. Notice that, but without turning it into an object, which is to say recognize yourself as subjectivity itself. (not 'the subject') |
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Apr 26, 2013 22:36:22 GMT -5
Yes I wondered about that. But as you're pointing out in another post, what is seeing that observing perspective? It's like there are three friggin things going on: perceptual stuff, an observing, then a noticing of the observing and perceptual stuff. It's on the last one that breathing started to crank. I'm not sure I can follow what your experience is, but here it sounds like attention is just backing out it's focus of attention from stuff, to the observer of stuff, to the noticing of the observing. It doesn't imply multiple things going on, just an adjustment of the zoom lens. You are the one noticing everything that can be noticed. Notice that, but without turning it into an object, which is to say recognize yourself as subjectivity itself. (not 'the subject') This might be an example of what Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche calls spiritual materialism, ego jumping in and continually trying to be part of the 'party'. Ego/self can't stand to be left out, always jumping in to co-opt territory where it-can't-even-actually-be. sdp |
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Apr 27, 2013 0:54:51 GMT -5
I dropped in last night, few added comments (one that left me exasperated...)......seems things were cooking a little today, some good stuff........ Most excellent repeat of Shawn Nevins comments..... Good that you picked up on correct meditation, correct was there for a reason. I'll try to be brief. Consider a newborn baby. Can a baby conceptualize? No. So what is a baby functioning through? A baby is born functioning through its attention, is born with attention, we could say a baby is living through their true self, their essence. Nature has gifted us with this wonderful brain/body. Baby from day one (actually, even somewhat while still in the womb) begins to collect information through the senses, information being recorded in the neural structure of the brain. Baby is breezing along in direct contact with reality living through their attention, timelessly, but at the same time storing the data. Eventually baby begins to connect what it senses with a symbolic representation, a particular word, baby is learning language. By the age of two a baby has a pretty good vocabulary and growing rapidly. Go back and trace your earliest memories, they will almost invariably be of direct sensations, probably sights, probably vivid color. With all the data stored, baby is forming a cultural self, AKA ego/false self, Enigma mentioned the conditioned self...that it is. Your ego is pretty-much a dead thing, a mass of recordings in the neural network of the brain. From birth to about the age of six baby/child is on a seesaw, a teeter-totter. At birth true self is holding down one end, feet on the ground, ego/persona/mask on the other end, nothing there, feet up in the air. As baby begins to store data in the brain, ego/persona begins to gain some weight. By about the age of six (give or take some months or even years), true self has disappeared, this end of the seesaw now up in the air, the other end weighed down, ego/persona has its feet on the ground. What has happened? At any time you think to do so, ask yourself where your attention is. Unless you have had a very long interior practice you will almost invariably find it is on some thought, emotion or action. IOW, your attention has actually been captured by and is being held by a thought, action or feeling. Your thoughts and feelings, which result in actions, are what constitute ego/persona/false self, the conditioned self, self. Notice another thing, whereas a newborn baby lives timelessly in the present moment, conditioned mind never lives in the present moment. self/conditioned mind/ego always lives either in the past through memory or the future through imagination. That's why I say that ego is essentially a dead thing, it's wholly composed of concepts, information stored in the neural network. You can also say it lives in sleep, ego/persona/conditioned mind can't but be asleep. Ego/conditioned mind is actually a cage that holds our attention captive. So, all that to say this. "Correct meditation" is simply freeing one's attention from being held captive. But simple is not easy. Freeing one's attention is the most difficult thing you will ever do. You actually have to learn to live like a little child again. Some excellent advise has been given in the previous posts. Your attention is separate from your thoughts, emotions, actions and sensations. If this were not so then we would be in a helpless situation. However, it is possible to separate out one's attention from one's thoughts, actions, feelings and sensations. Can ego/conditioned mind do this? No. Nothing can be done from the ego/persona side of the seesaw. This is why I said, in my original post on this thread, that self (little s)/ego/conditioned mind can do nothing, but it is not true that nothing can be done. You have to operate from the Self side of the seesaw, from true self/essence. If you can begin to live through your attention instead of it being constantly captured by thoughts, feelings and actions, then you begin to break the threads of captivity. You begin taking the energy out of ego/conditioned mind. And eventually there is a reversal of the seesaw, the true self/essence side gets weighty, and the ego/false self/conditioned mind side becomes the nothing side it actually is. So first you have to remember to ask yourself where your attention is, and then for a few seconds you can witness, observe what is, and then in a few more seconds, or minutes, or hours, or maybe even days, you will realize that your attention has once again disappeared into a thought, feeling or action.....and then you try again. So, maybe now you know more than you did when you started reading this post, maybe not (of course some here will not need this). But now maybe you begin to experiment a little, explore this. But simple is not easy. sdp I pretty much agree with what SDP has written here. However, I wouldn't say that ego/false self can think, feel, act, and sense because it simply doesn't exist. There is only one actor on the stage. It may appear to think, feel, act, and sense, but this is an illusionary appearance created by mistaking thoughts ABOUT reality for reality, itself. As E. would say, Source falls into the dream of its own creation by focusing upon thoughts rather than "what is." In a manner of speaking, self exists, but in reality, we're, in the words of Chuang Tzu, just empty boats. Enigma put it well, our neural network gets filled with information and out pops ego. We're just gears and pulleys and belts and buttons, what djimbebum called bio-robot on the new Reductionisms wet blanket thread. Conditioned mind is a mechanism. (Almost) everything we think, feel and do is the reaction of ego to the environment we find ourselves in, and even the environment we find ourselves in is directed by the haphazard contents of our neural structure. I say almost because we wouldn't be on this forum without a little tug inside from reality calling us. In truth, ego doesn't think or feel or do, it just reacts, we are insubstantial. This is hard on ego to even get theoretically, harder still to see. Most people have zero desire to get free of self, in fact, desire immortality for self, so what you say is incomprehensible. But something exists, and probably this something re-incarnates, some kind of standing-wave-of-energy, moves on, the whole karma trip, unless it gets dissolved. If you do not die before you die you will not die when you die, Sufi saying. BTW ZD, like the ship and rudder metaphor. sdp |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 27, 2013 2:43:46 GMT -5
If you do not die before you die you will not die when you die, Sufi saying. sdp Given what you were writing, it's easy to see why you wrote this, that way round. It's not exactly what the Sufis said though. |
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Post by laughter on Apr 27, 2013 6:21:41 GMT -5
This is hard on ego to even get theoretically, harder still to see. The concept of ego, a thought about what is, demands a model, a framework for support. Once built, from thoughts about thoughts about what is, ego can then step back and regard an abstraction of itself. Look at the surface of the moon. The only change comes from outside and we get an eternal record of collision. An encoding by crater. By contrast, the Earth writes a story of it’s own and partly in DNA. Universally speaking, there is a general movement from order toward disorder: entropy is constantly increasing and we see this expressed for example in the erosion of an impact crater by weather or the cycle of a solar furnace that eventually burns out and might explode, spreading the stuff of life in all directions far and wide into space. In the context of the distinction between life and non-life there is a nested counter-movement in the opposite direction toward order. The information encoded into our genes by the environment over time tells the story of the value of adaptability, flexibility and malleability. Ego is painted onto this canvas in a sort of natural arc. Anthropologists and Geologists mark the last great leap in evolution concurrent with a volcanic eruption that drastically changed the environment likely causing ecological upheaval and mass extreme scarcity on a global scale. This is preceded by several tens of millennia by a population bottleneck among our ancestors of only a few thousand individuals brought on by sudden extreme drought conditions in what’s now East Africa. These were just the tail end of billions of years of mass extinction events that punctuated periods of ecological stability. For life the message of the environment was clear: adapt or die out. This is expressed by ever-increasing complexity in the DNA of the organisms found on the planet over time. Look at a human baby with that big head … it’s useless! How is it that at the top of the food chain we find the genetic code with the highest level of helplessness of a newborn for the most amount of time after birth of anything that lives? What is the point of the investment of all that energy in that big brain at the expense of fur, claw and fang? It’s because the survival strategy isn’t fixed. The more tightly coupled with the specifics of the ecology an organism is the more vulnerable the species becomes to sudden changes in the environment. Culture is the most effective survival tool ever invented by nature. Abstracting and transmitting information across generations short-circuits the need for millennia of trial-and-error and abrogates the need for hard-wiring it into DNA. Self-reference, the cornerstone of ego, is either the impetus or at least the natural consequence of spoken language. Madness is nothing more and nothing less than a survival skill. It’s just that simple. If the self-reference is mistaken for actuality the natural Universal movement toward disorder is naturally seen as a threat – the weather, larger-faster more powerful animals, constant scarcity, and most of all, the constant competition with other people– it all seems to the individual as though it’s conspiring to kill him. Individuals with a natural aversion to succumbing to this are naturally more likely to survive and pass along this tendency. How ego comes to see it’s own madness from here is another story, equally involved, and just as natural. |
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Post by vacant on Apr 27, 2013 12:38:29 GMT -5
Thank you ZD, upon re-reading: yes, you are mostly right, and it may be that my rant was a tad off pitch. FWIW, I fault on selective reading, which is unfair, but some of your phrasings on this thread alone ie <the path of discovering the living truth is ignoring distractive thoughts and becoming still enough to see what is already the case>, ie <shifting attention away from thoughts to “what is” leads to freedom from the mind>, ie <*scrub scrub scrub* or “look look look* or “listen listen listen* is the path to freedom> seem to me to imply the value of applied methodology, of causality and becoming, and thus could be misleading coming from a poster of your much respected clarity. Would you agree? Am I in error? But for the ruffling I prefer not!  Words are crude little things when used as pointers, so if they don't resonate, throw 'em away. Yes, the words I used could be considered to be an applied methodology and point to the future, but remember, there's only one here, so the unfoldment proceeds however it will. Ramana's silence may be the best pointer, but even he finally started using words as pointers for people who didn't see where the silence was pointing. "Be Still and know that I am God" is a great pointer from the Bible, but millions of Christians can't see where those words are pointing. My words in the prior posts were simply expanding upon the same theme. The Zen novice is instructed to sit down and watch the breathing process. I expand that advice to include ATA throughout the day. Both activities require psychological presence, and both activities help people come out of their minds and back to reality. As I've noted before, when attentiveness is pursued, it is pursued under the illusion that there is a "someone" pursuing it. Many people practice meditation for years, and never see through that illusion because they think that the activity is special and that they are "making spiritual progress." Until it is seen that the do-er is a product of imagination, they remain trapped in a vicious cycle. All good. Thank you for your time. |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 29, 2013 11:59:55 GMT -5
So the contributions to the myth of self, in this case, would be my belief that there is indirect evidence that my belief exists? That the idea may be true, yes. Yeah, basically. Calling it a residual unconscious belief may be a way of insuring the continuation of a game. I don't think you really believe in the self so much as you want to, and so you mostly ignore the fact that there is no evidence for it, and go on with your life as though it's true. "You want to" sticks out for me there. If so, it seems unconscious. This reminds me of the whole willingness convo. If what is happening is fundamentally my wanting to believe in the self despite all evidence to the contrary, this indicates an unwillingness to ultimately see through beliefs, etc. And as with the willingness convo, it all seems unconscious because it appears to be the opposite of the case to me in conscious land. The issue I'm bringing up is that there appears to be evidence of a belief in a separate volitional self. The belief in a separate volitional person would spin experience in such a way that would be different if no belief existed. From my view I'm assuming that certain characteristics of behaviors that I see are partly the result of an unconscious belief in self. For example, defensiveness (where no mortal danger is remotely present). When it appears that defensiveness is a quality in my interactions with others, I'm assuming that this is because of a belief that there is some self that needs defending. Yes, despite knowing that there is no evidence that would uphold a belief in self. So maybe my a55umption is incorrect. Maybe defensiveness in human relations is not due to a belief in self but is just conditioning based on good ol flight or fight brainstem stuff. |
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Post by enigma on Apr 29, 2013 13:26:19 GMT -5
That the idea may be true, yes. Yeah, basically. Calling it a residual unconscious belief may be a way of insuring the continuation of a game. I don't think you really believe in the self so much as you want to, and so you mostly ignore the fact that there is no evidence for it, and go on with your life as though it's true. "You want to" sticks out for me there. If so, it seems unconscious. This reminds me of the whole willingness convo. If what is happening is fundamentally my wanting to believe in the self despite all evidence to the contrary, this indicates an unwillingness to ultimately see through beliefs, etc. And as with the willingness convo, it all seems unconscious because it appears to be the opposite of the case to me in conscious land. Yes. If by 'evidence' you mean that you go on acting like a separate, volitional self, this many not be evidence of a belief so much as a desire. In the same way, acting like the life of the party may not be evidence that you believe you ARE the life of the party so much as evidence of a desire to be such. FWIW, that's not what I see at the moment. It's neither a belief in the self nor a conditioned response. It's a pretense; a game mind is playing with itself. Maybe you don't know how clever and deceptive mind can be. |
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Post by runstill on Apr 29, 2013 13:58:58 GMT -5
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Post by enigma on Apr 29, 2013 14:16:23 GMT -5
Yes, maybe everything takes on more vibrancy and depth? The mind is delighted at the experience and terrified at the implications, so what it wants is for that to happen briefly now and then. |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 29, 2013 14:26:31 GMT -5
The whole reason I have joined these forums is just a little while ago coming across John Wren Lewis's very interesting account of his NDE, and how the fruits of that experience continue. I quote this bit here: Even so, there have been plenty of problems in adjusting to awakened life, because the rest of the world is still taking the separation state for granted, and my own “resurrected” mind still contains programs based on the assumptions of that state. So in the early days I made every effort to assume the role of spiritual seeker in the hope of finding help. It came as a real disappointment to find that no one I consulted, either in person or through books, had a clue, because ancient traditions and modern movements alike take for granted that the kind of eternity consciousness I’m living in is the preserve of spiritual Olympians, the mystical equivalent of Nobel laureates.Hmmmm, I wonder if John is not familiar with Goddess and Pagan understanding of the sacredness of reality? Ie., I can completely dig when he says how so many books, and myths are stuck in a linear groove for some enlightenment in-the-future, or at some time nature being 'put right'--I am VERY familiar with that, but does he not know about the work of radical feminists who have de-constructed the androcentric belief systems and rather talk about a Goddess who they have suppressed? I am just asking. Now the next thing I must add, that i WAS surprised to find these forums, and their title, because I had presumed John was warning people OFF 'spiritual teachers' for precsiely the reason they tend to dangle the carrot/bliss-in-the-future in front of their gullible followers. I saw this a lot with devotees of J.Krishnamurti! ALSO say you haven't GOT that feeling John describes, and yet still feel that nature is sacred, does this mean you need to 'get it'? Feel me? What about 'normal' feeling, is that NOT sacred? Or does it have to be 'mystical'? good question. I don' have an answer, except to say that Lewis's NDE was the result of eating a poisoned candy, which makes me wonder whether the gurus are hiding this little medicinal "ark of the covenent" from us to keep their enrollment rate up. |
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Post by Deleted on Oct 23, 2022 17:46:03 GMT -5
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