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Post by quinn on Feb 10, 2014 7:08:14 GMT -5
I like this tread. It seems the difficultly comes from the mind being interested in something other than Awareness. At least sometimes. So how to get the mind to lose interest in everything? Also focusing on objects outside oneself or trying to focus on Awareness as a way to get the mind to stop thinking seems okay but when the mind stops thinking nothing happens. I wonder why it takes a prolonged period of "not thinking" ...is it because there is really thoughts still going on unconsciously? I think it comes down to where the interest is, too. That's the way we're going to be drawn. But I wouldn't say the difficulty is "interest other than Awareness". I'd say it's interest in what mind is telling us about what's here and now. Interest in the interpretation as opposed to the actuality. The interpretation has a lot more drama and spice.  Losing interest could happen a lot of different ways. Tired of the drama, tired of suffering, longing for god-union (or whatever you want to call it). My personal favorite - losing faith in what the 'commentary' is telling me. Kinda like...someone lies to you enough times, you start not being interested in what they have to say. |
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Post by zendancer on Feb 10, 2014 7:48:51 GMT -5
"We are not actually able to stay in this awareness....." The illusion is that there is someone who sometimes stays in awareness and sometimes leaves it. In fact, there is no one who comes or goes, stays or leaves. Why do you say this? and to whom? the illusion is making repetitive claims to those you say are not there.. Find the one who asks these questions, and the answers will become obvious. |
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Feb 10, 2014 7:51:07 GMT -5
"We are not actually able to stay in this awareness....." The illusion is that there is someone who sometimes stays in awareness and sometimes leaves it. In fact, there is no one who comes or goes, stays or leaves. Why do you say this? and to whom? the illusion is making repetitive claims to those you say are not there.. If you go back you'll see that zd was referring to my previous post, a quote.....(he quoted a quote), a clarification, extrapolation, apt. However, if you hadn't noticed, zd's posts are usually impersonal, just for anybody and everybody.....nobody.......to whom it may concern....... sdp |
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Feb 10, 2014 8:47:25 GMT -5
I like this tread. It seems the difficultly comes from the mind being interested in something other than Awareness. At least sometimes. So how to get the mind to lose interest in everything? Also focusing on objects outside oneself or trying to focus on Awareness as a way to get the mind to stop thinking seems okay but when the mind stops thinking nothing happens. I wonder why it takes a prolonged period of "not thinking" ...is it because there is really thoughts still going on unconsciously? "So how to get mind to lose interest in everything?" This is not easy to answer. Have you ever walked through a mall and seen all the different kinds of stores? Some stores sell stuff that is just obviously crap....you wonder how they stay in business. There are stores to fit every type of personality, sports stuff, team stuff, books & music stuff.......diamonds and jewelry.... Eventually you just see that it's all just crap....trinkets... All you really need is enough food to get you through every day, clothes enough to keep you warm and out of jail (if your culture doesn't appreciate nudity....I guess most don't)........and a safe place to sleep and warm enough to keep you from freezing....... If you haven't see that everything you can put your eyes on merely consists of trinkets, just keep collecting trinkets until you do see.....every material thing is worthless. But I'm pretty sure you're there. So, you are really asking, although I know the only thing of real value is Awareness, why does my mind keep going back to the trinkets?.....why does my mind keep thinking about the useless stuff? ...."When the mind stops thinking nothing happens". Almost everybody here says that ego is not a problem, it's just a part of all that is bla, bla, bla....ego is not real....ego is just an illusion...bla, bla, bla... You've never heard me say that. Go back to the OP. Your true nature is the pure Awareness you were born with....born as. All the lines on the white paper are the contents of the centers, the forebrain, the neo-cortex, the intellectual center, your emotional center and your learned bodily movements, habits of thought, feeling and actions, these constitute ego. All the contents of the centers are like a series of wheels, gears and pulleys, really merely a Rube Goldberg machine (google it)....much ado about nothing. Sensations enter us from the outside and activate the gears and pulleys, energy feeds the mechanism. Even when we have seen that life consists of one trinket after another, energy entering us still feeds the mechanism and we think and fell and do stuff we don't really.......value. That seems to be where you are, what you're asking. Why do these thoughts keep coming up? (are there still thoughts going on unconsciously?) Where I differ with others here is to say that we can take the energy that perpetuates ego, out of ego. Ego isn't just an illusion, it exists as information in the neural structure of the brain....very much alive.......it is living tissue. Normally, your awareness and your attention are pulled back into the programming of the mind/brain, stuff we think and feel and do. But we can live through our awareness and attention instead of through thoughts, feelings and actions. Doing this takes the energy out of the contents of the centers, it makes an inner separation between the pure white paper and the lines in the paper. It disengages the wheels, gears and pulleys of ego, eventually you cease being drawn back to the trinkets of life. You can have memory of >who-you-were<, but the strings have been cut.....you are free of the tyranny of little-self/ego. You value Awareness over anything else....... Everybody else here (well, I guess mostly zd, E and S/Empty, but everybody else too by abdication) seems to make this out as so easy and natural....effortless.... This has not been the case.. for me..... sdp |
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Post by zendancer on Feb 10, 2014 8:55:29 GMT -5
I like this tread. It seems the difficultly comes from the mind being interested in something other than Awareness. At least sometimes. So how to get the mind to lose interest in everything? Also focusing on objects outside oneself or trying to focus on Awareness as a way to get the mind to stop thinking seems okay but when the mind stops thinking nothing happens. I wonder why it takes a prolonged period of "not thinking" ...is it because there is really thoughts still going on unconsciously? Good question. My speculation is that repetitive thinking gradually creates some kind of a neural structure or neural pathway in the brain, and it takes a certain amount of non-usage before the structure collapses or the neural pathway shifts. There have been various experiments that seem to support this kind of hypothesis. In the last century a psychologist created a special set of glasses that inverted the world that someone saw when wearing the glasses. After two or three weeks, the brain suddenly "learned"to shift the world upside down, and it was thereafter seen in that manner even when the glasses were removed (imagine looking around and seeing everything upside down!). The subjects in the experiment walked around for two or three more weeks without wearing the glasses while seeing everything upside down until, suddenly, everything shifted back to normal again! When attention is repeatedly shifted away from thoughts to direct sensory perception (what can be seen, heard, felt, etc), this activity apparently puts cumulative pressure upon the established neural pathway associated with reflective thought/imagination, until, suddenly, a shift occurs. This is what might be called a "gradual" path that leads to a sudden shift. The same sort of thing apparently happens when existential questions are contemplated deeply. The imaginatively-projected meta-world of the intellect eventually gives way to the deeper truths that underlie it. In the case of a person like Ramana, it may be that he was young and naturally non-reflective (hadn't practiced thinking as much as other people), so it didn't take much contemplation/self inquiry to become free of the intellect. Or, in his terminology, he may simply have been "a ripe soul." J. Krishnamurti as a child, according to what he told people later, spent hours and hours sitting by a lake simply looking and listening rather than daydreaming, and that activity may have prevented the neural pathway associated with imagination from becoming as deeply ingrained as most adults. Tolle's realization/experience was somewhat different, and he speculated that "the intense pressure of suffering that night must have forced my consciousness to withdraw from its identification with the unhappy and fearful self, which is ultimately a fiction of mind." Bottom line? The truth is unfathomably deep, but it is usually obscured by, in Tolle's words, "the compulsion of incessant thought." If attention is shifted away from thoughts to "what is," it may not appear that anything is happening, but people who have followed this path a significant distance generally do not agree with this conclusion. In fact, a great deal is happening, but it does not rise to the level of conscious recognition. Geologists have a machine for testing the elasticity of rocks. They place a rock in two steel jaws which begin to exert bending pressure on the rock. Depending upon the internal crystalline structure of the rock, it will gradually bend up to a certain point, and then suddenly snap into two pieces. The point of the snap is referred to as a "discontinuity." I suspect that just as different rocks break at different points depending upon their structure, the neural pathways of different humans shift at different points depending upon many different factors--age, intensity of desire to understand what's going on, past thinking habits, etc. This is all just speculation, but it seems like a reasonable hypothesis based upon the available evidence. |
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Post by Deleted on Feb 10, 2014 9:09:38 GMT -5
I like this tread. It seems the difficultly comes from the mind being interested in something other than Awareness. At least sometimes. So how to get the mind to lose interest in everything? Also focusing on objects outside oneself or trying to focus on Awareness as a way to get the mind to stop thinking seems okay but when the mind stops thinking nothing happens. I wonder why it takes a prolonged period of "not thinking" ...is it because there is really thoughts still going on unconsciously? "So how to get mind to lose interest in everything?" This is not easy to answer. Have you ever walked through a mall and seen all the different kinds of stores? Some stores sell stuff that is just obviously crap....you wonder how they stay in business. There are stores to fit every type of personality, sports stuff, team stuff, books & music stuff.......diamonds and jewelry.... Eventually you just see that it's all just crap....trinkets... All you really need is enough food to get you through every day, clothes enough to keep you warm and out of jail (if your culture doesn't appreciate nudity....I guess most don't)........Andrews a safe place to sleep and warm enough to keep you from freezing....... If you haven't see that everything you can put your eyes on merely consists of trinkets, just keep collecting trinkets until you do see.....every material thing is worthless. But I'm pretty sure you're there. So, you are really asking, although I know the only thing of real value is Awareness, why does my mind keep going back to the trinkets?.....why does my mind keep thinking about the useless stuff? ...."When the mind stops thinking nothing happens". Almost everybody here says that ego is not a problem, it's just a part of all that is bla, bla, bla....ego is not real....ego is just an illusion...bla, bla, bla... You've never heard me say that. Go back to the OP. Your true nature is the pure Awareness you were born with....born as. All the lines on the white paper are the contents of the centers, the forebrain, the neo-cortex, the intellectual center, your emotional center and your learned bodily movements, habits of thought, feeling and actions, these constitute ego. All the contents of the centers are like a series of wheels, gears and pulleys, really merely a Rube Goldberg machine (google it)....much ado about nothing. Sensations enter us from the outside and activate the gears and pulleys, energy feeds the mechanism. Even when we have seen that life consists of one trinket after another, energy entering us still feeds the mechanism and we think and fell and do stuff we don't really.......value. That seems to be where you are, what you're asking. Why do these thoughts keep coming up? (are there still thoughts going on unconsciously?) Where I differ with others here is to say that we can take the energy that perpetuates ego, out of ego. Ego isn't just an illusion, it exists as information in the neural structure of the brain....very much alive.......it is living tissue. Normally, your awareness and your attention are pulled back into the programming of the mind/brain, stuff we think and feel and do. But we can live through our awareness and attention instead of through thoughts, feelings and actions. Doing this takes the energy out of the contents of the centers, it makes an inner separation between the pure white paper and the lines in the paper. It disengages the wheels, gears and pulleys of ego, eventually you cease being drawn back to the trinkets of life. You can have memory of >who-you-were<, but the strings have been cut.....you are free of the tyranny of little-self/ego. You value Awareness over anything else....... Everybody else here (well, I guess mostly zd, E and S/Empty, but everybody else too by abdication) seems to make this out as so easy and natural....effortless.... This has not been the case.. for me..... sdp Nor is it the case for me, and I wonder if some of the "free and easy" folks aren't just posturing. But, if they have some kind of absolution so be it. |
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Post by zendancer on Feb 10, 2014 9:11:35 GMT -5
I like this tread. It seems the difficultly comes from the mind being interested in something other than Awareness. At least sometimes. So how to get the mind to lose interest in everything? Also focusing on objects outside oneself or trying to focus on Awareness as a way to get the mind to stop thinking seems okay but when the mind stops thinking nothing happens. I wonder why it takes a prolonged period of "not thinking" ...is it because there is really thoughts still going on unconsciously? "So how to get mind to lose interest in everything?" This is not easy to answer. Have you ever walked through a mall and seen all the different kinds of stores? Some stores sell stuff that is just obviously crap....you wonder how they stay in business. There are stores to fit every type of personality, sports stuff, team stuff, books & music stuff.......diamonds and jewelry.... Eventually you just see that it's all just crap....trinkets... All you really need is enough food to get you through every day, clothes enough to keep you warm and out of jail (if your culture doesn't appreciate nudity....I guess most don't)........and a safe place to sleep and warm enough to keep you from freezing....... If you haven't see that everything you can put your eyes on merely consists of trinkets, just keep collecting trinkets until you do see.....every material thing is worthless. But I'm pretty sure you're there. So, you are really asking, although I know the only thing of real value is Awareness, why does my mind keep going back to the trinkets?.....why does my mind keep thinking about the useless stuff? ...."When the mind stops thinking nothing happens". Almost everybody here says that ego is not a problem, it's just a part of all that is bla, bla, bla....ego is not real....ego is just an illusion...bla, bla, bla... You've never heard me say that. Go back to the OP. Your true nature is the pure Awareness you were born with....born as. All the lines on the white paper are the contents of the centers, the forebrain, the neo-cortex, the intellectual center, your emotional center and your learned bodily movements, habits of thought, feeling and actions, these constitute ego. All the contents of the centers are like a series of wheels, gears and pulleys, really merely a Rube Goldberg machine (google it)....much ado about nothing. Sensations enter us from the outside and activate the gears and pulleys, energy feeds the mechanism. Even when we have seen that life consists of one trinket after another, energy entering us still feeds the mechanism and we think and fell and do stuff we don't really.......value. That seems to be where you are, what you're asking. Why do these thoughts keep coming up? (are there still thoughts going on unconsciously?) Where I differ with others here is to say that we can take the energy that perpetuates ego, out of ego. Ego isn't just an illusion, it exists as information in the neural structure of the brain....very much alive.......it is living tissue. Normally, your awareness and your attention are pulled back into the programming of the mind/brain, stuff we think and feel and do. But we can live through our awareness and attention instead of through thoughts, feelings and actions. Doing this takes the energy out of the contents of the centers, it makes an inner separation between the pure white paper and the lines in the paper. It disengages the wheels, gears and pulleys of ego, eventually you cease being drawn back to the trinkets of life. You can have memory of >who-you-were<, but the strings have been cut.....you are free of the tyranny of little-self/ego. You value Awareness over anything else....... Everybody else here (well, I guess mostly zd, E and S/Empty, but everybody else too by abdication) seems to make this out as so easy and natural....effortless.... This has not been the case.. for me..... sdp SDP: Good post, but I don't agree with your last line. I did not say that cutting the strings of ego and past thought habits is either easy or hard. I said that INITIALLY it SEEMS as if great effort is required to shift attention away from thoughts, but after seeing through the see-er, it becomes obvious that the idea of anyone having made an effort was an erroneous idea. Afterwards, everything is seen as the natural functioning of a unified field of being. |
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Feb 10, 2014 9:48:05 GMT -5
"So how to get mind to lose interest in everything?" This is not easy to answer. Have you ever walked through a mall and seen all the different kinds of stores? Some stores sell stuff that is just obviously crap....you wonder how they stay in business. There are stores to fit every type of personality, sports stuff, team stuff, books & music stuff.......diamonds and jewelry.... Eventually you just see that it's all just crap....trinkets... All you really need is enough food to get you through every day, clothes enough to keep you warm and out of jail (if your culture doesn't appreciate nudity....I guess most don't)........and a safe place to sleep and warm enough to keep you from freezing....... If you haven't see that everything you can put your eyes on merely consists of trinkets, just keep collecting trinkets until you do see.....every material thing is worthless. But I'm pretty sure you're there. So, you are really asking, although I know the only thing of real value is Awareness, why does my mind keep going back to the trinkets?.....why does my mind keep thinking about the useless stuff? ...."When the mind stops thinking nothing happens". Almost everybody here says that ego is not a problem, it's just a part of all that is bla, bla, bla....ego is not real....ego is just an illusion...bla, bla, bla... You've never heard me say that. Go back to the OP. Your true nature is the pure Awareness you were born with....born as. All the lines on the white paper are the contents of the centers, the forebrain, the neo-cortex, the intellectual center, your emotional center and your learned bodily movements, habits of thought, feeling and actions, these constitute ego. All the contents of the centers are like a series of wheels, gears and pulleys, really merely a Rube Goldberg machine (google it)....much ado about nothing. Sensations enter us from the outside and activate the gears and pulleys, energy feeds the mechanism. Even when we have seen that life consists of one trinket after another, energy entering us still feeds the mechanism and we think and fell and do stuff we don't really.......value. That seems to be where you are, what you're asking. Why do these thoughts keep coming up? (are there still thoughts going on unconsciously?) Where I differ with others here is to say that we can take the energy that perpetuates ego, out of ego. Ego isn't just an illusion, it exists as information in the neural structure of the brain....very much alive.......it is living tissue. Normally, your awareness and your attention are pulled back into the programming of the mind/brain, stuff we think and feel and do. But we can live through our awareness and attention instead of through thoughts, feelings and actions. Doing this takes the energy out of the contents of the centers, it makes an inner separation between the pure white paper and the lines in the paper. It disengages the wheels, gears and pulleys of ego, eventually you cease being drawn back to the trinkets of life. You can have memory of >who-you-were<, but the strings have been cut.....you are free of the tyranny of little-self/ego. You value Awareness over anything else....... Everybody else here (well, I guess mostly zd, E and S/Empty, but everybody else too by abdication) seems to make this out as so easy and natural....effortless.... This has not been the case.. for me..... sdp SDP: Good post, but I don't agree with your last line. I did not say that cutting the strings of ego and past thought habits is either easy or hard. I said that INITIALLY it SEEMS as if great effort is required to shift attention away from thoughts, but after seeing through the see-er, it becomes obvious that the idea of anyone having made an effort was an erroneous idea. Afterwards, everything is seen as the natural functioning of a unified field of being. Hey zd, Yes, I recall that's what you said. But I came back and asked again, even though in the end you came to see that "the idea that anyone having made an effort was an erroneous idea", was not the erroneous effort necessary (at least in your case and maybe 99% of other cases) to eventually see that the erroneous effort was not necessary? .......... I don't remember a reply from you after asking that....... I take the lines on the paper to be a sort of prison, even though our real nature as pure awareness is still uncorrupted as the pure white paper under the lines, we take ourselves to be the lines, we forget who we are (not that we are a who...just a manner of speaking). .........I guess realization would be the instantaneous seeing that we are not the lines but (are) uncorrupted Awareness (and I agree with E here that one has nothing to do with the other). ...........What I'm saying is that, in fact, the "effort" comes from the side of pure Awareness, not from ego, can never come from ego. .........The effort from ego is what is erroneous. The "effort" from Awareness appears to be effort from the side of 'still mostly living through ego', but is not really because it is our natural state. I don't know if that makes sense.....?........ For most people ego becomes their default position (mountains are mountains). Then there is the search, the journey, the erroneous effort, the in-between state, (mountains are no longer mountains), movement from the lines back and forth to the white paper. Then, Awareness becomes the default position, effortless Awareness (mountains are once again mountains), as you say, "the natural functioning of a unified field of being". Lines are still there as memory of who one used to be, but not as an obstruction, the gears are no longer engaged, not dragging one back into trinkets...... sdp |
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Post by stardustpilgrim on Feb 10, 2014 10:24:24 GMT -5
I like this tread. It seems the difficultly comes from the mind being interested in something other than Awareness. At least sometimes. So how to get the mind to lose interest in everything? Also focusing on objects outside oneself or trying to focus on Awareness as a way to get the mind to stop thinking seems okay but when the mind stops thinking nothing happens. I wonder why it takes a prolonged period of "not thinking" ...is it because there is really thoughts still going on unconsciously? Good question. My speculation is that repetitive thinking gradually creates some kind of a neural structure or neural pathway in the brain, and it takes a certain amount of non-usage before the structure collapses or the neural pathway shifts. There have been various experiments that seem to support this kind of hypothesis. In the last century a psychologist created a special set of glasses that inverted the world that someone saw when wearing the glasses. After two or three weeks, the brain suddenly "learned"to shift the world upside down, and it was thereafter seen in that manner even when the glasses were removed (imagine looking around and seeing everything upside down!). The subjects in the experiment walked around for two or three more weeks without wearing the glasses while seeing everything upside down until, suddenly, everything shifted back to normal again! When attention is repeatedly shifted away from thoughts to direct sensory perception (what can be seen, heard, felt, etc), this activity apparently puts cumulative pressure upon the established neural pathway associated with reflective thought/imagination, until, suddenly, a shift occurs. This is what might be called a "gradual" path that leads to a sudden shift. The same sort of thing apparently happens when existential questions are contemplated deeply. The imaginatively-projected meta-world of the intellect eventually gives way to the deeper truths that underlie it. In the case of a person like Ramana, it may be that he was young and naturally non-reflective (hadn't practiced thinking as much as other people), so it didn't take much contemplation/self inquiry to become free of the intellect. Or, in his terminology, he may simply have been "a ripe soul." J. Krishnamurti as a child, according to what he told people later, spent hours and hours sitting by a lake simply looking and listening rather than daydreaming, and that activity may have prevented the neural pathway associated with imagination from becoming as deeply ingrained as most adults. Tolle's realization/experience was somewhat different, and he speculated that "the intense pressure of suffering that night must have forced my consciousness to withdraw from its identification with the unhappy and fearful self, which is ultimately a fiction of mind." Bottom line? The truth is unfathomably deep, but it is usually obscured by, in Tolle's words, "the compulsion of incessant thought." If attention is shifted away from thoughts to "what is," it may not appear that anything is happening, but people who have followed this path a significant distance generally do not agree with this conclusion. In fact, a great deal is happening, but it does not rise to the level of conscious recognition. Geologists have a machine for testing the elasticity of rocks. They place a rock in two steel jaws which begin to exert bending pressure on the rock. Depending upon the internal crystalline structure of the rock, it will gradually bend up to a certain point, and then suddenly snap into two pieces. The point of the snap is referred to as a "discontinuity." I suspect that just as different rocks break at different points depending upon their structure, the neural pathways of different humans shift at different points depending upon many different factors--age, intensity of desire to understand what's going on, past thinking habits, etc. This is all just speculation, but it seems like a reasonable hypothesis based upon the available evidence. Excellent post zd. Here is one way to look at it. Enormous energy is stored in ego, stored in the neural structure of the brain. This is how society runs, culture, countries. Countries go to war over how individuals value the information stored in ego. The neural structure is what determines our interests, what directs our attention, what takes our attention. All the energy that comes in-to us goes to reinforce the life of these neural pathways. Likewise, any pseudo spiritual effort by ego merely strengthens ego. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche called this spiritual materialism in his most excellent book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism. All genuine interior spiritual practices are about living again through pure Awareness instead of ego, about not-living through the dictates of ego via the information stored in the neural structure. To do this is to cease to give energy to these neural structures, you cease to feed ego, literally. What happens to anything if you cease to feed it? Eventually, it collapses. Krishnamurti talked about the brain cells changing at least back to the '70's long before what neuroscientists now call neuroplasticity. sdp |
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Post by laughter on Feb 10, 2014 12:20:16 GMT -5
I like this tread. It seems the difficultly comes from the mind being interested in something other than Awareness. At least sometimes. So how to get the mind to lose interest in everything? Also focusing on objects outside oneself or trying to focus on Awareness as a way to get the mind to stop thinking seems okay but when the mind stops thinking nothing happens. I wonder why it takes a prolonged period of "not thinking" ...is it because there is really thoughts still going on unconsciously? "So how to get mind to lose interest in everything?" This is not easy to answer. Have you ever walked through a mall and seen all the different kinds of stores? Some stores sell stuff that is just obviously crap....you wonder how they stay in business. There are stores to fit every type of personality, sports stuff, team stuff, books & music stuff.......diamonds and jewelry.... Eventually you just see that it's all just crap....trinkets... All you really need is enough food to get you through every day, clothes enough to keep you warm and out of jail (if your culture doesn't appreciate nudity....I guess most don't)........and a safe place to sleep and warm enough to keep you from freezing....... If you haven't see that everything you can put your eyes on merely consists of trinkets, just keep collecting trinkets until you do see.....every material thing is worthless. But I'm pretty sure you're there. So, you are really asking, although I know the only thing of real value is Awareness, why does my mind keep going back to the trinkets?.....why does my mind keep thinking about the useless stuff? ...."When the mind stops thinking nothing happens". Almost everybody here says that ego is not a problem, it's just a part of all that is bla, bla, bla....ego is not real....ego is just an illusion...bla, bla, bla... You've never heard me say that. Go back to the OP. Your true nature is the pure Awareness you were born with....born as. All the lines on the white paper are the contents of the centers, the forebrain, the neo-cortex, the intellectual center, your emotional center and your learned bodily movements, habits of thought, feeling and actions, these constitute ego. All the contents of the centers are like a series of wheels, gears and pulleys, really merely a Rube Goldberg machine (google it)....much ado about nothing. Sensations enter us from the outside and activate the gears and pulleys, energy feeds the mechanism. Even when we have seen that life consists of one trinket after another, energy entering us still feeds the mechanism and we think and fell and do stuff we don't really.......value. That seems to be where you are, what you're asking. Why do these thoughts keep coming up? (are there still thoughts going on unconsciously?) Where I differ with others here is to say that we can take the energy that perpetuates ego, out of ego. Ego isn't just an illusion, it exists as information in the neural structure of the brain....very much alive.......it is living tissue. Normally, your awareness and your attention are pulled back into the programming of the mind/brain, stuff we think and feel and do. But we can live through our awareness and attention instead of through thoughts, feelings and actions. Doing this takes the energy out of the contents of the centers, it makes an inner separation between the pure white paper and the lines in the paper. It disengages the wheels, gears and pulleys of ego, eventually you cease being drawn back to the trinkets of life. You can have memory of >who-you-were<, but the strings have been cut.....you are free of the tyranny of little-self/ego. You value Awareness over anything else....... Everybody else here (well, I guess mostly zd, E and S/Empty, but everybody else too by abdication) seems to make this out as so easy and natural....effortless.... This has not been the case.. for me..... sdp I don't see the ego as data, but as a process. It does seem that the process is skewed toward certain types of data, but in my estimation that apparent skew, like any other appearance, can be deceptive. |
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Post by laughter on Feb 10, 2014 12:41:03 GMT -5
I like this tread. It seems the difficultly comes from the mind being interested in something other than Awareness. At least sometimes. So how to get the mind to lose interest in everything? Also focusing on objects outside oneself or trying to focus on Awareness as a way to get the mind to stop thinking seems okay but when the mind stops thinking nothing happens. I wonder why it takes a prolonged period of "not thinking" ...is it because there is really thoughts still going on unconsciously? Good question. My speculation is that repetitive thinking gradually creates some kind of a neural structure or neural pathway in the brain, and it takes a certain amount of non-usage before the structure collapses or the neural pathway shifts. There have been various experiments that seem to support this kind of hypothesis. In the last century a psychologist created a special set of glasses that inverted the world that someone saw when wearing the glasses. After two or three weeks, the brain suddenly "learned"to shift the world upside down, and it was thereafter seen in that manner even when the glasses were removed (imagine looking around and seeing everything upside down!). The subjects in the experiment walked around for two or three more weeks without wearing the glasses while seeing everything upside down until, suddenly, everything shifted back to normal again! When attention is repeatedly shifted away from thoughts to direct sensory perception (what can be seen, heard, felt, etc), this activity apparently puts cumulative pressure upon the established neural pathway associated with reflective thought/imagination, until, suddenly, a shift occurs. This is what might be called a "gradual" path that leads to a sudden shift. The same sort of thing apparently happens when existential questions are contemplated deeply. The imaginatively-projected meta-world of the intellect eventually gives way to the deeper truths that underlie it. In the case of a person like Ramana, it may be that he was young and naturally non-reflective (hadn't practiced thinking as much as other people), so it didn't take much contemplation/self inquiry to become free of the intellect. Or, in his terminology, he may simply have been "a ripe soul." J. Krishnamurti as a child, according to what he told people later, spent hours and hours sitting by a lake simply looking and listening rather than daydreaming, and that activity may have prevented the neural pathway associated with imagination from becoming as deeply ingrained as most adults. Tolle's realization/experience was somewhat different, and he speculated that "the intense pressure of suffering that night must have forced my consciousness to withdraw from its identification with the unhappy and fearful self, which is ultimately a fiction of mind." Bottom line? The truth is unfathomably deep, but it is usually obscured by, in Tolle's words, "the compulsion of incessant thought." If attention is shifted away from thoughts to "what is," it may not appear that anything is happening, but people who have followed this path a significant distance generally do not agree with this conclusion. In fact, a great deal is happening, but it does not rise to the level of conscious recognition. Geologists have a machine for testing the elasticity of rocks. They place a rock in two steel jaws which begin to exert bending pressure on the rock. Depending upon the internal crystalline structure of the rock, it will gradually bend up to a certain point, and then suddenly snap into two pieces. The point of the snap is referred to as a "discontinuity." I suspect that just as different rocks break at different points depending upon their structure, the neural pathways of different humans shift at different points depending upon many different factors--age, intensity of desire to understand what's going on, past thinking habits, etc. This is all just speculation, but it seems like a reasonable hypothesis based upon the available evidence. one by one they come to be although no eyes the same do see similar so although it seems exactly only in a dream one by one until not two that silly notion, me and you the distant constant sublime song of what was the case so all along |
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Post by enigma on Feb 10, 2014 13:06:46 GMT -5
I like this tread. It seems the difficultly comes from the mind being interested in something other than Awareness. At least sometimes. So how to get the mind to lose interest in everything? Yes, we could say that's the problem, which is why sincerity is important and why I talk so much about the split mind. Mind puts itself in conflict with that split, and then sabotages the resolution of it. Your question above is an example of a split mind. There's just one mind there interested in all sorts of things, including how to make itself lose interest in all sorts of things. Hehe. There's a subtlety here that's worth talking about. It's true that if one is interested in seeing through illusions (and seeing through the illusions makes one far more 'accident prone'), the mind cannot be removed from the picture entirely. That would be a state of unconsciousness, and nobody ever realized anything while unconscious. So what we mean by not thinking is, as you suggest, no conscious thinking process. You have no control over unconscious movements of mind, which is why that activity needs to be relaxed by seeing through various illusions. (It's a bit of a catch 22) Even then, it's just certain ways of using the mind that present an obstacle to realization. What we've called the personal perspective refers all thoughts back to a 'me' in one way or another, and that 'me idea' is the primary illusion. Also, since seeing through illusions is not a mental process, such realizations only require an instant in which thoughts are not the focus of attention. (realization occurs in an instant. It's only thinking that takes time) If one needs to be in that mode for a long time, it's only because there is still too much unconscious movement going on and one really isn't in that mode. Seeing through illusions, which I often call realization, is most effective when one contemplates, and then puts the conscious thinking on pause and simply rests in an alert, empty attention. The focus of attention that the mind provides from it's contemplation will often reveal a larger, non-conceptual seeing in that moment, which will naturally stimulate mind to (hopefully, gently) conceptualize what is being seen. So, there's a subtle kind of working with mind to help it see more clearly. It's not awareness that needs to realize something, so mind can't be dismissed. It's mind's confusion and mind needs to be involved in clearing it up. It does, however, have to cooperate. |
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Post by enigma on Feb 10, 2014 14:10:50 GMT -5
I like this tread. It seems the difficultly comes from the mind being interested in something other than Awareness. At least sometimes. So how to get the mind to lose interest in everything? Also focusing on objects outside oneself or trying to focus on Awareness as a way to get the mind to stop thinking seems okay but when the mind stops thinking nothing happens. I wonder why it takes a prolonged period of "not thinking" ...is it because there is really thoughts still going on unconsciously? I think it comes down to where the interest is, too. That's the way we're going to be drawn. But I wouldn't say the difficulty is "interest other than Awareness". I'd say it's interest in what mind is telling us about what's here and now. Interest in the interpretation as opposed to the actuality. The interpretation has a lot more drama and spice. Losing interest could happen a lot of different ways. Tired of the drama, tired of suffering, longing for god-union (or whatever you want to call it). My personal favorite - losing faith in what the 'commentary' is telling me. Kinda like...someone lies to you enough times, you start not being interested in what they have to say. Yes, and (and here's the catch 222 again) we lose interest in stuff that we realize isn't true, which is the reason for seeing through illusions to begin with. |
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Post by Beingist on Feb 10, 2014 14:15:21 GMT -5
I think it comes down to where the interest is, too. That's the way we're going to be drawn. But I wouldn't say the difficulty is "interest other than Awareness". I'd say it's interest in what mind is telling us about what's here and now. Interest in the interpretation as opposed to the actuality. The interpretation has a lot more drama and spice. Losing interest could happen a lot of different ways. Tired of the drama, tired of suffering, longing for god-union (or whatever you want to call it). My personal favorite - losing faith in what the 'commentary' is telling me. Kinda like...someone lies to you enough times, you start not being interested in what they have to say. Yes, and (and here's the catch 222 again) we lose interest in stuff that we realize isn't true, which is the reason for seeing through illusions to begin with. Might want to speak for yourself on that one, E. I don't find myself losing interest in stuff I realize isn't 'true' (or 'false', or any of that). All thought is illusion. Eventually, I suspect losing interest in all thought. |
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Post by enigma on Feb 10, 2014 14:46:14 GMT -5
I like this tread. It seems the difficultly comes from the mind being interested in something other than Awareness. At least sometimes. So how to get the mind to lose interest in everything? Also focusing on objects outside oneself or trying to focus on Awareness as a way to get the mind to stop thinking seems okay but when the mind stops thinking nothing happens. I wonder why it takes a prolonged period of "not thinking" ...is it because there is really thoughts still going on unconsciously? "So how to get mind to lose interest in everything?" This is not easy to answer. Have you ever walked through a mall and seen all the different kinds of stores? Some stores sell stuff that is just obviously crap....you wonder how they stay in business. There are stores to fit every type of personality, sports stuff, team stuff, books & music stuff.......diamonds and jewelry.... Eventually you just see that it's all just crap....trinkets... All you really need is enough food to get you through every day, clothes enough to keep you warm and out of jail (if your culture doesn't appreciate nudity....I guess most don't)........and a safe place to sleep and warm enough to keep you from freezing....... If you haven't see that everything you can put your eyes on merely consists of trinkets, just keep collecting trinkets until you do see.....every material thing is worthless. But I'm pretty sure you're there. So, you are really asking, although I know the only thing of real value is Awareness, why does my mind keep going back to the trinkets?.....why does my mind keep thinking about the useless stuff? ...."When the mind stops thinking nothing happens". Almost everybody here says that ego is not a problem,it's just a part of all that is bla, bla, bla....ego is not real....ego is just an illusion...bla, bla, bla... You've never heard me say that. My guess is that hardly anybody here says ego is not a problem. To say it is not real, or is an illusion, is not to dismiss it or say it is not a problem. Illusion ARE a problem. To say it is an illusion is to point out that it's not what it appears to be. No, there are learned bodily movements, habits of thought, feeling and actions that have nothing to do with ego. Ego is a set of self identifying thoughts and their associated feelings. We think, feel and do stuff precisely because we DO value it. Just because the brain exists as living tissue doesn't imply some of the information in it is not illusion. Nobody here has said it's easy or effortless. When peeps talk about effortlessness, they're pointing to your true nature. They're not saying it's effortless to accomplish that through ego. On the contrary, that's going to be very effortfull. |
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