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Post by topology on May 9, 2014 21:16:46 GMT -5
Can you give a concrete example of when this happens?Your analogy does not work. The actors need to be in the same position. Driver and Thinker have to play the same role in the analogy. If there is no driver without a vehicle, then there is no thinker without thought. With the proper structure in the analogy, we can see that the thinker's existence depends on the existence of thought. Trees grow, but there is no grower of trees. Water flows but there is no flow-er of water. Wind blows, but there is no blower of the wind. The heart pumps, but there is no pumper of the heart. Discrete doers are a product of our mind trying to reason and cope with the perceived world. The mind thinks, but there is no thinker behind the mind. The tree grows itself, water follows the pull of gravity, energy seeks balance in movement/change and the wind blows.. the human grows itself.. the simple tendency for order to emerge from chaos, self-organization.. The analogy is: that without a vehicle/medium ('thinker'), there is no 'thought'.. it is the body-mind, through which the 'thought' (a description dependent on the meaning assigned by a body-mind) is given context, experience, structure and expression, and.. the diversity of thought is dependent on the diversity of manifested expression, varieties of vehicles through which 'thought' is manifested and expressed through the thinker's/vehicle's unique experiences.. which is to say: if there were 'thoughts' (drivers) waiting to happen (drive), neither can happen without the vehicle through which that happens.. tangible/intangible, there are no one-sided coins.. . I find it to be neither honest nor open. Its effect is to shut down discussion. If what you are saying is that the thinker is the vehicle through which thought travels, then the thinker goes far beyond me as a localized manifestation. I have experienced several instances of shared thought/telepathic connection. I could not lay personal claim to being the thinker. What I would identify as "me" is just a localized pattern of thought within a transpersonal medium. |
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Post by silver on May 9, 2014 21:24:28 GMT -5
Hey empty, I couldn't find the book that you mentioned somewhere on this thread that you and Laughter were talking about.
Would you repeat the name of the book, please?
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Post by stardustpilgrim on May 9, 2014 22:27:06 GMT -5
Hey empty, I couldn't find the book that you mentioned somewhere on this thread that you and Laughter were talking about. Would you repeat the name of the book, please? Zen Training, Methods and Philosophy by Katsuki Sekida, first edition 1975, fifteenth printing 2001. There is also a condensed version taken from that book, but I think money is better spent on the full version. (I'll look up that title anyway. I stumbled upon it some months back, however, having learned my lesson about publishers deception, looked at the beginning of the book and saw that it was entirely contained within Zen Training. It's, A Guide to Zen, Lessons from a Modern Master, Jan. 25, 2013, Katsuki Sekida and Marc Allen). sdp |
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Post by silver on May 9, 2014 23:01:49 GMT -5
Hey empty, I couldn't find the book that you mentioned somewhere on this thread that you and Laughter were talking about. Would you repeat the name of the book, please? Zen Training, Methods and Philosophy by Katsuki Sekida, first edition 1975, fifteenth printing 2001. There is also a condensed version taken from that book, but I think money is better spent on the full version. (I'll look up that title anyway. I stumbled upon it some months back, however, having learned my lesson about publishers deception, looked at the beginning of the book and saw that it was entirely contained within Zen Training. It's, A Guide to Zen, Lessons from a Modern Master, Jan. 25, 2013, Katsuki Sekida and Marc Allen). sdp Oh, it was you, sdp? Thanks for that info. |
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Post by stardustpilgrim on May 9, 2014 23:05:02 GMT -5
Zen Training, Methods and Philosophy by Katsuki Sekida, first edition 1975, fifteenth printing 2001. There is also a condensed version taken from that book, but I think money is better spent on the full version. (I'll look up that title anyway. I stumbled upon it some months back, however, having learned my lesson about publishers deception, looked at the beginning of the book and saw that it was entirely contained within Zen Training. It's, A Guide to Zen, Lessons from a Modern Master, Jan. 25, 2013, Katsuki Sekida and Marc Allen). sdp Oh, it was you, sdp? Thanks for that info. No, it was empty, I just know the book (just chipping in, in case empty wasn't around for a while........)......... |
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Post by Deleted on May 10, 2014 0:20:19 GMT -5
Oh, it was you, sdp? Thanks for that info. No, it was empty, I just know the book (just chipping in, in case empty wasn't around for a while........)......... Thanks SDP.....and Silver, yeah thats the book... SDP, I think Katsuki put a book out of commentary on the Mumonkan or something similar too. |
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Post by tzujanli on May 10, 2014 5:11:23 GMT -5
Your appeal to faith in your belief as the final arbiter of differing perspectives is unfounded.. The tree grows itself, water follows the pull of gravity, energy seeks balance in movement/change and the wind blows.. the human grows itself.. the simple tendency for order to emerge from chaos, self-organization.. The analogy is: that without a vehicle/medium ('thinker'), there is no 'thought'.. it is the body-mind, through which the 'thought' (a description dependent on the meaning assigned by a body-mind) is given context, experience, structure and expression, and.. the diversity of thought is dependent on the diversity of manifested expression, varieties of vehicles through which 'thought' is manifested and expressed through the thinker's/vehicle's unique experiences.. which is to say: if there were 'thoughts' (drivers) waiting to happen (drive), neither can happen without the vehicle through which that happens.. tangible/intangible, there are no one-sided coins.. . I find it to be neither honest nor open. Its effect is to shut down discussion. If what you are saying is that the thinker is the vehicle through which thought travels, then the thinker goes far beyond me as a localized manifestation. I have experienced several instances of shared thought/telepathic connection. I could not lay personal claim to being the thinker. What I would identify as "me" is just a localized pattern of thought within a transpersonal medium. It's unfortunate that you feel justified in shutting down the conversation with " This is your standard mud slinging", rather than notice that the broad diversity of perspectives/beliefs/understandings neutralizes the notion that what any one experiencer has 'the' answer.. I do not suggest that the thinker is confined to the physical being, never have, but.. neither do i suggest that the physical being is an illusion, or in any way a less than equal participant in what is happening, 'now'.. the limitlessness of 'that' which we are is revealed through the vehicle of the 'thinker', and each thinker's perspective/mindscape is uniquely separate AND collectively bound in the discovery of its potential.. The medium is transpersonal AND transrational, the still mind understands and accepts the actuality that it is BOTH 'part' AND 'whole' simultaneously, in this version of itself, in this ongoing experience of 'now'.. the still mind is not 'thinking/imagining' stories about its impotence or existence, it is integrating its unique perspective with the greater cosmic consciousness.. the confusion is revealed when the experiencers project their beliefs beyond what is actually happening now.. |
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Post by Ishtahota on May 10, 2014 8:56:56 GMT -5
I have often told people that prayer is talking to spirit, God, ancestors or what ever you wish to call it. And meditation is learning to listen to what they have to say. I tell people that they have to learn to experience what we call numb brain, that roar of silence between the ears, before this communication can even start. Some people get to this numb brain place easy and some have to work at it for years. The sweat lodge is the only short cut that I know of to help people experience this silence is just a few hours. I tell people if they want to learn to meditate they need to remember this feeling and learn to return to this place.
It is a great place to get answers. The only problem that I have is remembering that I had a question. Real spitit stuff is real simple, if a six year old cannot understand it, it might not be worth saying.
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Post by topology on May 10, 2014 11:01:02 GMT -5
This is your standard mud slinging based on a presupposition of what you believe about what I supposedly believe.. I find it to be neither honest nor open. Its effect is to shut down discussion. If what you are saying is that the thinker is the vehicle through which thought travels, then the thinker goes far beyond me as a localized manifestation. I have experienced several instances of shared thought/telepathic connection. I could not lay personal claim to being the thinker. What I would identify as "me" is just a localized pattern of thought within a transpersonal medium. It's unfortunate that you feel justified in shutting down the conversation with " This is your standard mud slinging", rather than notice that the broad diversity of perspectives/beliefs/understandings neutralizes the notion that what any one experiencer has 'the' answer.. I do not suggest that the thinker is confined to the physical being, never have, but.. neither do i suggest that the physical being is an illusion, or in any way a less than equal participant in what is happening, 'now'.. the limitlessness of 'that' which we are is revealed through the vehicle of the 'thinker', and each thinker's perspective/mindscape is uniquely separate AND collectively bound in the discovery of its potential.. The medium is transpersonal AND transrational, the still mind understands and accepts the actuality that it is BOTH 'part' AND 'whole' simultaneously, in this version of itself, in this ongoing experience of 'now'.. the still mind is not 'thinking/imagining' stories about its impotence or existence, it is integrating its unique perspective with the greater cosmic consciousness.. the confusion is revealed when the experiencers project their beliefs beyond what is actually happening now.. Mudslinging was the wrong term. But you opened the conversation with the statement that the faith in my beliefs are unfounded. You presume that I have beliefs, know what they are, that I have faith in them and that you determine it to be unfounded. When you presume to know about me, it does not leave an open space for me to participate. This pattern is fairly common with you from what I've seen. Disparage what someone else has said and then supplant your own thoughts. That is what I was trying to describe in the term mudslinging. Everything you just uttered to me sounds like the beliefs you carry around and have faith in. When my mind goes silent/still so does any concept of part and whole. |
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Post by enigma on May 10, 2014 11:15:00 GMT -5
I'm going to disagree about still mind = no thought. I am borderline ADD, an obsessive compulsive thinker. To me, there is no "stilling" of the mind. Instead I think what is meant by "still mind" is that one is in a mode of aware observation sans identification with anything.To me, a still mind or even quiet mind is more about the nature and attitude demonstrated in the content of the mind. Absent of any personal agenda, absent of an obsessed narrowed focus, alert, healthy, at the ready. In the background the mind can be active and chewing on a bone, but the whole system is more present, alert and aware. In essence, the minds activity is not interfering with how you relate to the rest of the experience you are having. My experience of this is that in the absence of identification there is less thought. Seems the explanation would be that the structure that formed (we could say, for the sake of argument, in the brain), was both the subject of and the source of alot of thought that can be ultimately seen as repetitive, negative and useless. Here's an odd analogy. The 'me thought' is like having a child. Once we've given birth to it, we feel responsible for it's welfare. We want to protect it, nurture it, help it to learn and grow up to become a happy, responsible 'me thought'. We also enjoy it and laugh and play with it, and most of all we grow to love (and sometimes hate) it as it is the epitome of intimacy. If folks can identify with that analogy, it's useful to notice that it IS a relationship of one to another in which the 'other' bears a striking resemblance to Harvy the rabbit. |
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Post by enigma on May 10, 2014 11:38:38 GMT -5
From my POV, and I think from Ramana's POV, a still mind is a silent mind. The body functions intelligently without a personal narrative. Seeing and responding to whatever is happening is a seamless process that does not require mental verbalization. FWIW, I do not regularly go through the day in total mental silence, but the body can, sometimes just for fun, totally stop thinking and yet continue to perform intelligently. Self-referential thinking sometimes occurs, but not in the same way as it did prior to seeing through the illusion of "the little guy in the head pulling levers"-ha ha. Gary Weber claims that his personal narrative and sense of selfhood ended completely on a particular day while he was doing a yoga exercise. His mind simply went silent. Something similar, though perhaps not as extreme, happened in the case of this body. We both pursued various meditative practices for a long time, and the same sort of thing seems to have happened to both of us. It's no big deal, but that sort of thing seems to be more common for people who do lots of ATA or other similar attention-shifting activities. Weber speculates that meditative practices (ATA, inquiry, yoga, repetitive physical practices such as tai chi done with awareness, etc, change the way the brain functions via neuroplasticity, and I suspect that he is correct. By repeatedly shifting attention away from self-referential thinking, the neural pathway associated with the sense of selfhood either collapses or is in some way significantly or permanently bypassed. The body/mind is intelligent, and it can reason without verbalized thoughts, so when Top is referring to problem-solving, this kind of processing apparently can go on without the usual reflexive internal dialogue. Weber writes about going to business meetings with a totally silent mind, and without any planning, yet he interacted with people intelligently and offered solutions to problems that he thought were better than anything he could have thought up from his prior self-referential perspective. Leonard Jacobsen has written somewhere, "People cannot imagine how little I think. I think when it is necessary, and when it isn't necessary, I don't think." IOW, a still mind is much stiller than most people imagine. Leonard Jacobsen obviously believes in volition, because he thinks he can think when necessary and not think when it isn't necessary. No one chooses or decides to have a still mind. It's either thoughts have retreated to the background or they aren't arising with any frequency. But there isn't someone choosing to think or not think. In other words thinking or not thinking isn't a problem. The arising of thinking itself creates a thinker. That's the problem. He's probly just describing what's happening. There's no implication that he places himself as the volitional cause. |
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Post by laughter on May 10, 2014 12:27:27 GMT -5
My experience of this is that in the absence of identification there is less thought. Seems the explanation would be that the structure that formed (we could say, for the sake of argument, in the brain), was both the subject of and the source of alot of thought that can be ultimately seen as repetitive, negative and useless. Here's an odd analogy. The 'me thought' is like having a child. Once we've given birth to it, we feel responsible for it's welfare. We want to protect it, nurture it, help it to learn and grow up to become a happy, responsible 'me thought'. We also enjoy it and laugh and play with it, and most of all we grow to love (and sometimes hate) it as it is the epitome of intimacy. If folks can identify with that analogy, it's useful to notice that it IS a relationship of one to another in which the 'other' bears a striking resemblance to Harvy the rabbit.  Harvey is maybe what some folks wind up with after they've made friends with their me and listened to him and soothed and stroked his fur for awhile ... you know -- let him calm down, fed a few carrots so that he's not so grumpy ..  "Miss Kelly, perhaps you'd like this flower. I seem to have misplaced my buttonhole ... Miss Kelly, you know, when you wear my flower you make it look beautiful." (kiki from the Tolle board's sig) |
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Post by Deleted on May 10, 2014 12:30:08 GMT -5
Leonard Jacobsen obviously believes in volition, because he thinks he can think when necessary and not think when it isn't necessary. No one chooses or decides to have a still mind. It's either thoughts have retreated to the background or they aren't arising with any frequency. But there isn't someone choosing to think or not think. In other words thinking or not thinking isn't a problem. The arising of thinking itself creates a thinker. That's the problem. He's probly just describing what's happening. There's no implication that he places himself as the volitional cause. Yeah, probably, I'm just saying thinking when necessary and not thinking when it isn't necessary isn't non-volition. |
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Post by laughter on May 10, 2014 12:32:52 GMT -5
When my mind goes silent/still so does any concept of part and whole. Yes, my experience too. A still mind is absent any theories about what is -- but even more than that, any theories about anything seem, at best, a hindrance to and a bridge away from a still mind. |
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Post by laughter on May 10, 2014 12:51:23 GMT -5
I have often told people that prayer is talking to spirit, God, ancestors or what ever you wish to call it. And meditation is learning to listen to what they have to say. I tell people that they have to learn to experience what we call numb brain, that roar of silence between the ears, before this communication can even start. Some people get to this numb brain place easy and some have to work at it for years. The sweat lodge is the only short cut that I know of to help people experience this silence is just a few hours. I tell people if they want to learn to meditate they need to remember this feeling and learn to return to this place. It is a great place to get answers. The only problem that I have is remembering that I had a question. Real spitit stuff is real simple, if a six year old cannot understand it, it might not be worth saying. Never prayed very much for most of my life until in my thirties my wife would occasionally ask me to pray with her .. looking back it was likely her way of trying to interest me in Christianity. The part of any prayer where one asks for something always has struck me as sardonically amusing and brings to mind Joplin's "Mercedez Benz", so I've always been inclined to keep that part very light, general and altruistic ... and I always insisted on praying to "whatever is". The moment of mental stillness after any prayer did catch my attention though, I must admit. Meditation is simply prayer without asking for something or apologizing for anything. |
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Harvey is maybe what some folks wind up with after they've made friends with their me and listened to him and soothed and stroked his fur for awhile ... you know -- let him calm down, fed a few carrots so that he's not so grumpy ..