|
|
Post by jasonl on May 2, 2012 11:22:17 GMT -5
Well I think it does! Yes it's being treated as something which shouldn't be there because I don't want it to be there, it's severely limiting my life. My thought process has practically disappeared, I hate it. How can I accept something so completely opressive? Acceptance isn't really something you do, it is the surrender of resistance to whatever's not being accepted. While conscious verbal thought may not be appearing on the surface, there clearly are still thought processes unfolding, interpretations happening, feelings surfacing and being pushed back down. Anxiety is typically a call for attention and greater understanding, but more often than not its treated as an enemy and something to be avoided at all costs. When anxiety is treated in that way, non dual teachings become a haven for mind to implement its new found personal agenda geared up toward feeling a certain way. This is what is meant by the phrase, the person only gets in the way. So, its not the anxiety itself which is oppressive, but the mind's interpretation of the behavioral ramifications of treating the anxiety in a way that the mind clearly wants to treat it. If and when that is no longer desirable, alternative means will be pursued. |
|
|
|
Post by zendancer on May 2, 2012 11:28:47 GMT -5
Well I think it does! Yes it's being treated as something which shouldn't be there because I don't want it to be there, it's severely limiting my life. My thought process has practically disappeared, I hate it. How can I accept something so completely opressive? Acceptance isn't really something you do, it is the surrender of resistance to whatever's not being accepted. While conscious verbal thought may not be appearing on the surface, there clearly are still thought processes unfolding, interpretations happening, feelings surfacing and being pushed back down. Anxiety is typically a call for attention and greater understanding, but more often than not its treated as an enemy and something to be avoided at all costs. When anxiety is treated in that way, non dual teachings become a haven for mind to implement its new found personal agenda geared up toward feeling a certain way. This is what is meant by the phrase, the person only gets in the way. So, its not the anxiety itself which is oppressive, but the mind's interpretation of the behavioral ramifications of treating the anxiety in a way that the mind clearly wants to treat it. If and when that is no longer desirable, alternative means will be pursued. Yup yup. Well said. |
|
|
|
Post by lemongrass on May 2, 2012 11:41:38 GMT -5
Because of this thread, I re-read "Collision with the Infinite" yesterday, and it remains one of the most remarkable books I have ever read. That was probably my tenth or twelth read of the book, and I am always amazed at the fluidity and clarity of Segal's writing. The similarity between what Midnight has described and what happened to Segal is astonishing. She even writes about how her cognitive filters collapsed which made it extremely uncomfortable to be around groups of people (too much input). Although it took her many years of useless therapy before she encountered people who understood what had happened to her and made suggestions about what to do, her book offers a great deal of hope to anyone experiencing what Midnight described in his initial posting. Silence and Laughter are right on target with their questions, but they are looking at the situation from a radically different POV than Midnight. Hopefully, Segal's book will offer Midnight some much-needed insights into what happens when one plunges into the void all-at-once as compared to a more gradual descent made up of smaller discontinuous jumps. Although Segal suffered through more than a decade of no-self-generated fear, eventually she came to terms with the fact that Vastness is the underlying truth, and came to appreciate that she was the Vastness. Suzanne Segals experience seems a bit more intense than mine. She was so disconnected from her body that she felt 'she' was behind it, looking at it. I don't have dissociation to that extent. I still feel like 'me' at times. I'm just surprised that I don't see anyone else talking about this stuff. None of you have been or are going through this?! I'm amazed that more people haven't reported feelings of dissocation through meditation or self-inquiry to be honest... I guess you guys did it correctly and I didn't.  By the way zendancer I just ordered her book. Yeah I can relate to the dissociation you are talking about it. Seing my body move as if its some thing that I am not really moving myself. I stopped entering into that particular mind state/reification/whatever because it was creepy and unpleasant. Even without going through what Suzanne had gone through one could sit down and creep oneself out through many kinds of thought experiments. If one's mode of thinking is related to suffering I do not recommend it. I am guessing newborn babies don't have a sense of self like adults. Do they have fear and get freaked out in the way Suzanne did? I wouldn't be surprised if Suzanne was like caught somewhere inbetween letting go of a self and holding on to a self .... like trying to make sense of an absence of self with a self. It's really just another self. That's why I say if one's self is related to suffering I do not recommend it. But of course we can't always help it. |
|
|
|
Post by zendancer on May 2, 2012 12:06:32 GMT -5
Because of this thread, I re-read "Collision with the Infinite" yesterday, and it remains one of the most remarkable books I have ever read. That was probably my tenth or twelth read of the book, and I am always amazed at the fluidity and clarity of Segal's writing. The similarity between what Midnight has described and what happened to Segal is astonishing. She even writes about how her cognitive filters collapsed which made it extremely uncomfortable to be around groups of people (too much input). Although it took her many years of useless therapy before she encountered people who understood what had happened to her and made suggestions about what to do, her book offers a great deal of hope to anyone experiencing what Midnight described in his initial posting. Silence and Laughter are right on target with their questions, but they are looking at the situation from a radically different POV than Midnight. Hopefully, Segal's book will offer Midnight some much-needed insights into what happens when one plunges into the void all-at-once as compared to a more gradual descent made up of smaller discontinuous jumps. Although Segal suffered through more than a decade of no-self-generated fear, eventually she came to terms with the fact that Vastness is the underlying truth, and came to appreciate that she was the Vastness. Suzanne Segals experience seems a bit more intense than mine. She was so disconnected from her body that she felt 'she' was behind it, looking at it. I don't have dissociation to that extent. I still feel like 'me' at times. I'm just surprised that I don't see anyone else talking about this stuff. None of you have been or are going through this?! I'm amazed that more people haven't reported feelings of dissocation through meditation or self-inquiry to be honest... I guess you guys did it correctly and I didn't. By the way zendancer I just ordered her book. Ha ha. I often tell peeps that they can't go wrong because there's no right way or wrong way to do anything. You've made some good points in this post. I, too, was struck by your initial posting because not too many people have written about the kind of experiences you reported. I wondered if that was because it is really rare or because most people who write about this path follow "happier" paths and therefore write "happier" stories about them. I mentioned your story to several friends who are interested in non-duality, and I was amazed to discover that one of them strongly identified with your experiences. If Segal represents the extreme end of the spectrum, and you represent a less-extreme, but still unpleasant end of the spectrum, the woman who identified with your story represents a slightly-less but still significant end of that spectrum with you. She, too, still has a sense of selfhood, but it is accompanied by a disconcerting amount of depersonalization, disorientation, and numbness to feelings. She, too, does not enjoy it, wishes it would end, and would like to feel like a more involved participant in a world that increasingly seems surreal. This makes me think that what you described may be more common than it appears. Your account also triggered a lot of other memories. In the past I met various people who claimed to have had very negative experiences as a result of meditation. One fellow had such a frightening experience that he never wanted to meditate again. Tolle's story indicates that when he was drowning in despair, one single thought plunged him into a mental vortex that revolutionized his understanding of reality, eliminated 80% of his thinking, and left him in a state of bliss for almost two years. Clearly, one size does not fit all, and the non-blissful end of the non-duality-experience spectrum clearly deserves far more consideration. Segal eventually came to acccept her total absence of selfhood, and even revel in it, but the story of how that happened is too long to write here. You'll need to read it for yourself in her book. She speculates (like I and others do) that the vastness experiences itself out of some unknown sense organ for which mind has no reference. Mind pathologizes what it has no reference for, and therefore seeks to remain with (or return to) the world of the known. The key to acceptance lies in seeing from beyond the framework of mind what is happening and ceasing to resist the obvious. Segal's case is extreme, but the same kind of pathologizing she describes as the dominant theme of her "wintertime" is apparent in both your story and the story I heard the other night from someone else. Segal eventually experienced a "springtime" when she gave up pathologizing the obvious, and discovered that there was much more to discover. |
|
|
|
Post by zendancer on May 2, 2012 12:22:06 GMT -5
Suzanne Segals experience seems a bit more intense than mine. She was so disconnected from her body that she felt 'she' was behind it, looking at it. I don't have dissociation to that extent. I still feel like 'me' at times. I'm just surprised that I don't see anyone else talking about this stuff. None of you have been or are going through this?! I'm amazed that more people haven't reported feelings of dissocation through meditation or self-inquiry to be honest... I guess you guys did it correctly and I didn't. By the way zendancer I just ordered her book. Yeah I can relate to the dissociation you are talking about it. Seing my body move as if its some thing that I am not really moving myself. I stopped entering into that particular mind state/reification/whatever because it was creepy and unpleasant. Even without going through what Suzanne had gone through one could sit down and creep oneself out through many kinds of thought experiments. If one's mode of thinking is related to suffering I do not recommend it. I am guessing newborn babies don't have a sense of self like adults. Do they have fear and get freaked out in the way Suzanne did? I wouldn't be surprised if Suzanne was like caught somewhere inbetween letting go of a self and holding on to a self .... like trying to make sense of an absence of self with a self. It's really just another self. That's why I say if one's self is related to suffering I do not recommend it. But of course we can't always help it. Well, Segal is an extreme case because in one blinding flash she experienced a total loss of selfhood that never returned, ever. It scared her unimaginably, and she did everything she could think of (unsuccessfully) in an effort to recover a sense of normalcy. Her awareness of the vastness as the vastness became her timeless experience, and she reports that the vastness was awake 24/7 whether the body was awake or asleep. In her case, which is obviously pretty rare, the vastness totally woke up to itself through the sense organ/circuitry by which it is aware of itself, and never regained the remotest sense of individual selfhood. From her POV there was never again a person (nor had there ever been a person) to whom her name applied. What she calls "the vastness" is the only actuality, and I think all sages are in total agreement with this. |
|
|
|
Post by silence on May 2, 2012 12:35:46 GMT -5
Because of this thread, I re-read "Collision with the Infinite" yesterday, and it remains one of the most remarkable books I have ever read. That was probably my tenth or twelth read of the book, and I am always amazed at the fluidity and clarity of Segal's writing. The similarity between what Midnight has described and what happened to Segal is astonishing. She even writes about how her cognitive filters collapsed which made it extremely uncomfortable to be around groups of people (too much input). Although it took her many years of useless therapy before she encountered people who understood what had happened to her and made suggestions about what to do, her book offers a great deal of hope to anyone experiencing what Midnight described in his initial posting. Silence and Laughter are right on target with their questions, but they are looking at the situation from a radically different POV than Midnight. Hopefully, Segal's book will offer Midnight some much-needed insights into what happens when one plunges into the void all-at-once as compared to a more gradual descent made up of smaller discontinuous jumps. Although Segal suffered through more than a decade of no-self-generated fear, eventually she came to terms with the fact that Vastness is the underlying truth, and came to appreciate that she was the Vastness. Suzanne Segals experience seems a bit more intense than mine. She was so disconnected from her body that she felt 'she' was behind it, looking at it. I don't have dissociation to that extent. I still feel like 'me' at times. I'm just surprised that I don't see anyone else talking about this stuff. None of you have been or are going through this?! I'm amazed that more people haven't reported feelings of dissocation through meditation or self-inquiry to be honest... I guess you guys did it correctly and I didn't. By the way zendancer I just ordered her book. I've met some pretty serious terror, confusion, dissociation, thinking I'm going totally crazy. I have talked about it on occasion. |
|
|
|
Post by merrick on May 2, 2012 12:55:50 GMT -5
Ha ha. I often tell peeps that they can't go wrong because there's no right way or wrong way to do anything. This is true only if ''right'' and ''wrong'' express a judgement. Merrick |
|
|
|
Post by lemongrass on May 2, 2012 13:24:54 GMT -5
Yeah I can relate to the dissociation you are talking about it. Seing my body move as if its some thing that I am not really moving myself. I stopped entering into that particular mind state/reification/whatever because it was creepy and unpleasant. Even without going through what Suzanne had gone through one could sit down and creep oneself out through many kinds of thought experiments. If one's mode of thinking is related to suffering I do not recommend it. I am guessing newborn babies don't have a sense of self like adults. Do they have fear and get freaked out in the way Suzanne did? I wouldn't be surprised if Suzanne was like caught somewhere inbetween letting go of a self and holding on to a self .... like trying to make sense of an absence of self with a self. It's really just another self. That's why I say if one's self is related to suffering I do not recommend it. But of course we can't always help it. Well, Segal is an extreme case because in one blinding flash she experienced a total loss of selfhood that never returned, ever. It scared her unimaginably, and she did everything she could think of (unsuccessfully) in an effort to recover a sense of normalcy. Her awareness of the vastness as the vastness became her timeless experience, and she reports that the vastness was awake 24/7 whether the body was awake or asleep. In her case, which is obviously pretty rare, the vastness totally woke up to itself through the sense organ/circuitry by which it is aware of itself, and never regained the remotest sense of individual selfhood. From her POV there was never again a person (nor had there ever been a person) to whom her name applied. What she calls "the vastness" is the only actuality, and I think all sages are in total agreement with this. Sure, vastness or void or whatever word, I know what that is and what the sages are talking about. I said what I said because Segal, as you mentioned in your previous post, went through a decade of fear? I myself don't see any reason why someone would have to go through periods of fear or something else negative to realize that vastness. Maybe that kind of weird unpleasant stuff is bound to happen for some people, there residuals egos still grasping while dying. Imo if their is ongoing fear, selfhood is not gone yet. One could say selfhood is not seperate from vastness. So maybe in Segal's 24/7 shift selfhood was still running its course (towards its end) but now Segal was not the center of it, not the experiencer of it, not the person behind it. I still don't know about that ongoing fear part, or other strange things that might have happened in her case. Maybe her shift was not as 24/7 as she thought. |
|
|
|
Post by zendancer on May 2, 2012 13:28:30 GMT -5
Ha ha. I often tell peeps that they can't go wrong because there's no right way or wrong way to do anything. This is true only if ''right'' and ''wrong'' express a judgement. Merrick Correct. |
|
|
|
Post by andrew on May 2, 2012 13:51:03 GMT -5
Suzanne Segals experience seems a bit more intense than mine. She was so disconnected from her body that she felt 'she' was behind it, looking at it. I don't have dissociation to that extent. I still feel like 'me' at times. I'm just surprised that I don't see anyone else talking about this stuff. None of you have been or are going through this?! I'm amazed that more people haven't reported feelings of dissocation through meditation or self-inquiry to be honest... I guess you guys did it correctly and I didn't. By the way zendancer I just ordered her book. Yeah I can relate to the dissociation you are talking about it. Seing my body move as if its some thing that I am not really moving myself. I stopped entering into that particular mind state/reification/whatever because it was creepy and unpleasant. Even without going through what Suzanne had gone through one could sit down and creep oneself out through many kinds of thought experiments. If one's mode of thinking is related to suffering I do not recommend it. I am guessing newborn babies don't have a sense of self like adults. Do they have fear and get freaked out in the way Suzanne did? I wouldn't be surprised if Suzanne was like caught somewhere inbetween letting go of a self and holding on to a self .... like trying to make sense of an absence of self with a self. It's really just another self. That's why I say if one's self is related to suffering I do not recommend it. But of course we can't always help it. This sounds right to me. There is going to be some kind of abstraction going on which is really just another self even though it seems as if there has been a letting go. I remember a particular state I used to find myself in sometimes, it felt like I was in a void, and I would feel scared, but would tell myself that this was the 'correct' state and that I was just going to have to get used to it. Really it was just more fear, more holding on, there was still a game being played. |
|
|
|
Post by Peter on May 2, 2012 13:58:29 GMT -5
This is true only if ''right'' and ''wrong'' express a judgement. How could they fail to? |
|
|
|
Post by merrick on May 2, 2012 14:45:07 GMT -5
This is true only if ''right'' and ''wrong'' express a judgement. How could they fail to? Sorry Peter, I don't understand your question. |
|
|
|
Post by zendancer on May 2, 2012 16:26:56 GMT -5
When writing about Segal, I've used the pronoun "she," but from the POV of Vastness, no such person ever existed. Segal was something like a chicken whose head has been cut off; the body continued with its usual functions, but the mind ran in circles of fear having no center to connect with or act as a reference point. The mind became literally untethered from its past mooring.
I doubt that anyone who reads her book will think that any sort of selfhood continued after her "collision with the infinite." Her writing is so clear on this subject, and her story is so compelling, that I would be surprised if anyone on this forum would doubt that the events unfolded exactly as she described.
A few other body/minds have experienced a sudden and complete disintegration of selfhood, but in every other account I've read about the mind accepted what had happened, and did not fight to regain a sense of selfhood as a point of reference. Segal's story simply illustrates that human beings are complex little suckers, and the range of possible experiences is as vast as the vastness itself.
If we contemplate the stories of Ramana, Segal, Tolle, Niz, Ramesh, and hundreds of other non-standard-model-following peeps, we can only conclude that no rules (concepts) can be applied to how the vastness may choose to wake up to itself.
This thread, alone, indicates that there is a relatively significant but relatively undocumented negative-thought-feeling-producing band of the awakening spectrum. Midnight apparently has lots of company!
This afternoon the woman called me who I mentioned earlier. She asked if I had ever experienced any of the negative stuff she had mentioned to me. I told her that when I was in college, I suffered what I then considered to be a severe case of existential angst. I was reading Camus, Sartre, et al, and began to see life the same way that they did--absurd and meaningless. This often made me feel as if I were outside the house of life looking through a window at the activity inside. I don't remember any depersonalization or disassociation, but I certainly remember a strong sense of alienation and surrealness caused by incessant thinking. Today, it is obvious to me how incessant thinking separates the apparent individual from the flow of life, psychologically, and creates the sense of being a "pitiful me in here" looking at "a happier world out there."
Apparently, whether someone has blissful experiences or unpleasant experiences on this path is determined solely by the luck of the draw. My advice to the woman who called me was to shift attention away from thoughts to..... blah blah blah. She replied, "But if I do that, won't I be running away from the unpleasantness?" I could only chuckle. Shades of Mamza! I said, "Your question is a good example of how the mind conjures up confusion for itself, koan after koan. You have several choices. First, you can trust me and do what I'm suggesting; second, you can sit and contemplate this new koan that your mind has just generated; third, you can investigate who is having unpleasant feelings; or fourth, you can continue thinking about, reinforcing, and resisting the feeling that life is unpleasant. Life is what it is. Resisting the obvious can be exhausting. Accepting the obvious leads to easier isness."
|
|
|
|
Post by merrick on May 2, 2012 17:58:10 GMT -5
Apparently, whether someone has blissful experiences or unpleasant experiences on this path is determined solely by the luck of the draw. Oh no, I can only say that a systematic spiritual work, ideally under a qualified guidance, can prevent much of that unpleasantness and can really be a highly enjoyable step-by-step process. From what I myself have experienced and heard by others, some seemingly insurmountable barriers are awaiting almost everybody on their path, but they usually don't have to be that serious and long lasting. ... the body continued with its usual functions, but the mind ran in circles of fear having no center to connect with or act as a reference point. I have seen signs of that happening to a young woman on a meditation retreat. She was loosing the sense of identity and she started to panick. But fortunately the teacher who lead the retreat was able to handle such a situation very well and give her much needed assurance. Merrick |
|
|
|
Post by lemongrass on May 2, 2012 22:46:21 GMT -5
Tolle probably got bliss because he had major depression and anxiety for a long time before "the event".
Him and other "spiritual people/teachers" wanted cool stories and something special, something extraordinary to happen. As with such things there will be bliss and suffering coming together.
|
|
