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Post by justlikeyou on May 13, 2024 17:33:29 GMT -5
Laughter and JLY: I, too, was struck by the statement, "to stabilize and integrate samadhi requires countless awakenings, countless humblings of the mind, countless little deaths." This process may be applicable to some people (especially if the word "samadhi" is interpreted more broadly than NS), but I know two or three young people who have contemplated ND and suddenly awakened without ever spending any time in either NS or shallower forms of samadhi. One young man, for example, after contemplating ND issues was playing with his cat one afternoon when he suddenly realized that there is no separation, and when that happened, he saw that his sense of selfhood had been an illusion and various self-referential thought patterns simply fell away. He had not meditated in any formal sense and had never experienced NS. Furthermore, his realization was not like a kensho and was not dramatic at all. It was just a sudden seeing that THIS is all there is, and that THIS is a unified whole. If the word "samadhi" is interpreted more broadly to mean directly interacting with reality by staying psychologically present without much reflection, then the above statement is probably applicable to a lot of people. However, I suspect that the writer is referring to a more Zen-like pathway of formal meditation involving NS and many kenshos because Zen people think of the pathway from that POV. I'm not sure that the idea of "integrating and stabilizing in samadhi" is meaningful unless that phrase points to gradually becoming increasingly action-oriented and free from the intellect until attention stays primarily focused on what's happening NOW and SR has occurred. Dilullo interviews people who suddenly wake up, like the man above, as well as people who follow a progressive pathway more like the one pointed to in the video. The one thing that's becoming increasingly clear via social media and youtube videos is that there are an infinite number of ways that people discover "what's going on." You may have just figured it out with that ZD. I second the bolded part. |
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Post by laughter on May 14, 2024 12:30:37 GMT -5
Hey, feel free to share what you mean about your daughter, but I can understand if you'd rather not do that out here in public. Sounds interesting.  I once had a teacher who swore his job was to help heal broken people. Believed that a healthy ego (mind) was better suited to the pathless path than an unhealthy one. My daughter was raised by her mother. A manipulating narcissistic character who loved to party. I don't want to go into the details but will say that my daughter's first several years of meditation involved examination of countless unconscious assumptions and unforgiveness' that would spontaneously bubble to the surface for resolution. She apparently needed that because these days are different. Her mind is far more docile and she is able to and often does enjoy meditating in long periods of silence. Thanks for sharing that, and I wish the best for her. As I alluded, I rezz'd with most of the vid. Meditation is the gold standard of advice for all sorts of situations, reasons and people. And then there's a flip side where if our perceptions aren't too distorted it's easy to tell whether someone we're listening to is sane and free of guile or venality in what they're saying to us. On the other hand, it's easy to become confused out at the extremes far past the conventional consensus mind states, for even the most well adjusted individual. The vid is well produced, and appeals to a response out beyond emotion, but every coin in the world, has two sides, always up in the air, end-over-end. |
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Post by laughter on May 14, 2024 16:19:32 GMT -5
Dilullo interviews people who suddenly wake up, like the man above, as well as people who follow a progressive pathway more like the one pointed to in the video. The one thing that's becoming increasingly clear via social media and youtube videos is that there are an infinite number of ways that people discover "what's going on." I liked his presentation in this one, although I'm not a fan of the deliberately hypnotic elements (even if he meant "OBEY" ironically  ):
I can relate to both of the experiences he described. The "boredom" of meditation .. but for me, by then, the people at the Tolle forum had turned me onto RM, and it was instantly crystal clear when the thought of "boring" popped up "who is it that finds this boring?". As for the monkey-mind banging cymbals for attention, for me that eventually all coalesced into a one-pointed focus on the existential question, with ideas about Quantum Mechanics at the center of the hyper-mind tornado. All the while, I knew that the answers didn't lie in thought .. but still, they cycled .. Thanks for the recommendation. |
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Post by justlikeyou on May 14, 2024 19:18:33 GMT -5
I once had a teacher who swore his job was to help heal broken people. Believed that a healthy ego (mind) was better suited to the pathless path than an unhealthy one. My daughter was raised by her mother. A manipulating narcissistic character who loved to party. I don't want to go into the details but will say that my daughter's first several years of meditation involved examination of countless unconscious assumptions and unforgiveness' that would spontaneously bubble to the surface for resolution. She apparently needed that because these days are different. Her mind is far more docile and she is able to and often does enjoy meditating in long periods of silence. Thanks for sharing that, and I wish the best for her. As I alluded, I rezz'd with most of the vid. Meditation is the gold standard of advice for all sorts of situations, reasons and people. And then there's a flip side where if our perceptions aren't too distorted it's easy to tell whether someone we're listening to is sane and free of guile or venality in what they're saying to us. On the other hand, it's easy to become confused out at the extremes far past the conventional consensus mind states, for even the most well adjusted individual. The vid is well produced, and appeals to a response out beyond emotion, but every coin in the world, has two sides, always up in the air, end-over-end. Thank you, L. Her journey has been a joy to observe. Yes, two sides. |
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Post by justlikeyou on May 15, 2024 18:28:37 GMT -5
L and ZD. Came across this quote by Nisargadatta. I hear it speaking to the chord the video struck in you guys.
"The witness is merely a point in awareness. It has no name and form. It is like the reflection of
the sun in a drop of dew. The drop of dew has name and form, but the little point of light is caused
by the sun. The clearness and smoothness of the drop is a necessary condition but not sufficient by
itself. Similarly clarity and silence of the mind are necessary for the reflection of reality to appear in
the mind, but by themselves they are not sufficient. There must be reality beyond it. Because reality
is timelessly present, the stress is on the necessary conditions."
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Post by stardustpilgrim on May 15, 2024 19:55:09 GMT -5
L and ZD. Came across this quote by Nisargadatta. I hear it speaking to the chord the video struck in you guys. "The witness is merely a point in awareness. It has no name and form. It is like the reflection of the sun in a drop of dew. The drop of dew has name and form, but the little point of light is caused by the sun. The clearness and smoothness of the drop is a necessary condition but not sufficient by itself. Similarly clarity and silence of the mind are necessary for the reflection of reality to appear in the mind, but by themselves they are not sufficient. There must be reality beyond it. Because reality is timelessly present, the stress is on the necessary conditions." I don't see how ZD can agree with this, as he has told us for 15 years the ~drop of dew~ is imaginary. But it does speak perfectly to minute 10 and afterwards. |
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Post by laughter on May 15, 2024 20:06:45 GMT -5
L and ZD. Came across this quote by Nisargadatta. I hear it speaking to the chord the video struck in you guys. "The witness is merely a point in awareness. It has no name and form. It is like the reflection of the sun in a drop of dew. The drop of dew has name and form, but the little point of light is caused by the sun. The clearness and smoothness of the drop is a necessary condition but not sufficient by itself. Similarly clarity and silence of the mind are necessary for the reflection of reality to appear in the mind, but by themselves they are not sufficient. There must be reality beyond it. Because reality is timelessly present, the stress is on the necessary conditions." His explorations of a quiet mind were quite exquisite, even if there are sometimes translation issues. The refinement between witness, witnessing and witnessed is fodder for much of his poetry, because, poetry, is exactly what it is. Once a guy asked him (paraphrasing from my memory) if the witness was the ultimate, and his reply was "you don't build a house on a bridge".  |
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Post by justlikeyou on May 15, 2024 20:09:43 GMT -5
L and ZD. Came across this quote by Nisargadatta. I hear it speaking to the chord the video struck in you guys. "The witness is merely a point in awareness. It has no name and form. It is like the reflection of the sun in a drop of dew. The drop of dew has name and form, but the little point of light is caused by the sun. The clearness and smoothness of the drop is a necessary condition but not sufficient by itself. Similarly clarity and silence of the mind are necessary for the reflection of reality to appear in the mind, but by themselves they are not sufficient. There must be reality beyond it. Because reality is timelessly present, the stress is on the necessary conditions." I don't see how ZD can agree with this, as he has told us for 15 years the ~drop of dew~ is imaginary. But it does speak perfectly to minute 10 and afterwards. Hmmm. Lets see if ZD has anything to say about that. |
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Post by stardustpilgrim on May 15, 2024 20:15:19 GMT -5
"It may seem to us that we have direct, unfiltered access to the wider world, but, in truth, each of us lives in a world of our own making. What we see and sense is a hallucination; it is actively generated by the brain. We recognize it as a hallucination only when it slips its leash--when the brain somehow fails to recalibrate our private world to match the evidence of our senses". George Musser quoting Karl Friston, psychiatrist, physicist, computational neuroscientist, in his book Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, Why Physicists are Studying Human Consciousness and AI to Unravel the Mysteries of the Universe, 2023, page 69
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Post by stardustpilgrim on May 15, 2024 22:38:17 GMT -5
L and ZD. Came across this quote by Nisargadatta. I hear it speaking to the chord the video struck in you guys. "The witness is merely a point in awareness. It has no name and form. It is like the reflection of the sun in a drop of dew. The drop of dew has name and form, but the little point of light is caused by the sun. The clearness and smoothness of the drop is a necessary condition but not sufficient by itself. Similarly clarity and silence of the mind are necessary for the reflection of reality to appear in the mind, but by themselves they are not sufficient. There must be reality beyond it. Because reality is timelessly present, the stress is on the necessary conditions." His explorations of a quiet mind were quite exquisite, even if there are sometimes translation issues. The refinement between witness, witnessing and witnessed is fodder for much of his poetry, because, poetry, is exactly what it is. Once a guy asked him (paraphrasing from my memory) if the witness was the ultimate, and his reply was "you don't build a house on a bridge". Was just poking around... Maurice Frydman also translated a book by Ramana (and I think I recall correctly, the reason being he also knew Ramana). www.everherenow.com/2013/12/a-remarkable-man-maurice-frydman.htmlFrom I Am That Wiki Most of the conversations were in Marathi, but for the benefit of Westerners talks were often translated. Frydman: ″Whenever I was present the task would fall to me. Many of the questions put and answers given were so interesting and significant that a tape-recorder was brought in. While most of the tapes were of the regular Marathi-English variety, some were polyglot scrambles of several Indian and European languages. Later, each tape was deciphered and translated into English″ . All the conversations were recorded at Nisargadatta's small tenement and later transcribed and translated by Frydman while the master was still unknown to the Western public. A Marathi version of the talks, verified by Nisargadatta, was published separately. According to Nisargadatta, "Maurice (Frydman) told me, 'Everything that is said here is immediately lost, though it could be of a great benefit for those looking for truth. I would like to translate and publish your words so others might know them. And so, he wrote I Am That". www.wisdom2be.com/essays-insights-wisdomwritings-spirituality/the-extraordinary-life-of-maurice-frydman-biographical-collectionFrom the link above: Maurice Frydman is one of most extraordinary people I’ve ever come across and virtually nothing is known about him. And because of his connection with Ramana Maharshi, Krishnamurti, Gandhi, Nisargadatta, the Dali Lama I kind of view him in my own mind as a Forest Gump of 20th century spirituality. He was in all the right places in all the right times to get the maximum benefit of interaction with some of the greats of Indian spirituality… He was a Gandhian, he worked for the uplift of the poor in India, he worked with Tibetan refugees, he edited extraordinary books [like] “I am That,” probably one of the all time spiritual classics. This man for me a shining beacon of how devotees could and should be with their teachers. He was just absolutely an extraordinary man. And went out of his way to cover his tracks; to hide what he actually had accomplished in his life. So I’ve enjoyed the detective work of looking in obscure placers, digging out stuff that he personally tried to hide, not because it was embarrassing, but because he didn’t like to take credit for what he’d done. So I see this as an opportunity to wave the Maurice flag and say “look look, this is one of the greatest devotee, sadoc seekers from the West whose been to India in the last 100 years, and I think more people should know about him.” ~David Godman Going to look for the Ramana book... Maharshi's Gospel Kindle Edition by Ramana Maharshi (Author), Maurice Frydman (Narrator) I think you can find a free PDF |
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Post by sharon on May 16, 2024 1:58:55 GMT -5
L and ZD. Came across this quote by Nisargadatta. I hear it speaking to the chord the video struck in you guys. "The witness is merely a point in awareness. It has no name and form. It is like the reflection of the sun in a drop of dew. The drop of dew has name and form, but the little point of light is caused
by the sun. The clearness and smoothness of the drop is a necessary condition but not sufficient by itself. Similarly clarity and silence of the mind are necessary for the reflection of reality to appear in the mind, but by themselves they are not sufficient. There must be reality beyond it. Because reality is timelessly present, the stress is on the necessary conditions." From this POV it would be like asking, " Can the Infinite create awareness when all there is is the Infinite's awareness."
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Post by stardustpilgrim on May 16, 2024 17:47:30 GMT -5
One aspect of this question is how even to define the various structures. There are no perfectly sharp boundaries in nature. Where does the brain give way to the rest of the nervous system? What are the limits of the body? "Physics doesn't really tell us what are the objects, the entities, in the world," Tononi said. "It's all a giant field of things; it's very complicated. But it doesn't really put borders in any fundamental sense. So how do we know where things end and begin?" Same book, Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation by George Musser, page 94
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Post by stardustpilgrim on May 18, 2024 10:40:06 GMT -5
"It may seem to us that we have direct, unfiltered access to the wider world, but, in truth, each of us lives in a world of our own making. What we see and sense is a hallucination; it is actively generated by the brain. We recognize it as a hallucination only when it slips its leash--when the brain somehow fails to recalibrate our private world to match the evidence of our senses". George Musser quoting Karl Friston, psychiatrist, physicist, computational neuroscientist, in his book Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation, Why Physicists are Studying Human Consciousness and AI to Unravel the Mysteries of the Universe, 2023, page 69 Take the mind-body (the body is ~real~, the small s self-avatar is not-real) to be a spider. It spends its web. It sits in the center, and through its web senses anything that touches its web. The spider is the mind-body, it's web is its extension into the world, like our 5 senses. So, actually, The only connection between the spider and the ~exterior~ world, is its web (the 5 senses). So the quote in accurate, for the most part, for most people. Go back to the person. We send out energy into the world, and the world sends back, the same quality of energy, because we experience only-what-we-are. What we send out is the quality of the self-avatar, it's thoughts, feelings/emotions and bodily interactions. It's like light polarity, we can receive-back only what resonates with our own self-avatar. The way I've said this before is, the world is a hall of mirrors, same idea, different metaphor. We see in the world what resonates with the self-avatar. The spider only receives what the spiderweb conveys to it. Now, this is how most people live. We get back to lolly's point and my point. The spider-self-avatar can't do anything, except live-through the spiderweb in-between. The person self-avatar cannot act directly on the world, because IT IS the world. But the mind-body can live-through attention and/or awareness, this is what brings changes. The self-avatar can't directly make changes in its relationship with the world. So, there isn't just the imaginary self (self-avatar) and the world. There's the mind-body (actuality), the world, and the in-between, essence (attention-awareness). Yes, the imaginary self-avatar can't do anything, can't do anything (except in a certain sense, submit). I can't see the operation of the world in any other sense, nothing else makes sense. This view allows for all the differentiation we see in the world, psychologically. The self-avatar just perpetuates its own view, automatically (and so in a very real sense lives in a locked box, psychologically. The inside walls of the box reflect-back the non-being of the imaginary self-avatar). There's another name for this, and Chuang Tzu wrote about it as 'the frog in a well'. Each self-avatar just perpetuates its own memes. And the only way of escape, is through attention-awareness. The walls of the box, each individual imaginary box, are formed through the connections between neurons. The connections between neurons are what form the web, the spiderweb (or net, or network). And they filter out everything that does not correspond to self (the imaginary self-avatar). So it becomes almost impossible to escape one's own individual *box*, because everything is self-validating. We see what-we-are, not what is. But then too, people with similar beliefs form tribes. |
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Post by zendancer on May 19, 2024 4:13:25 GMT -5
I don't see how ZD can agree with this, as he has told us for 15 years the ~drop of dew~ is imaginary. But it does speak perfectly to minute 10 and afterwards. Hmmm. Lets see if ZD has anything to say about that. I'm currently in Portugal, so a bit out of touch, but the basic approach is to take away name and form from people attached to name and form, and to take away emptiness from people who are attached to emptiness. If all boundaries are cognitive illusions, what can we say about that which has no boundaries? All we can do is point and say, "Take a look for yourself." In Portugal ND is "não-dualidade." FWIW, Lisbon (Lisboa) is an amazing city. Today we head to Cascais for five days. Lots of fun! Foi divertido. I spent three weeks studying Portuguese only to find out that European Portuguese is vastly different than Brazilian Portuguese, which is what all of the language courses teach. Haha. I had to start all over. Portugues e' uma lingua dificil (because it is accented and many syllables are simply skipped over or omitted altogether.) |
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Post by justlikeyou on May 19, 2024 8:20:05 GMT -5
Hmmm. Lets see if ZD has anything to say about that. I'm currently in Portugal, so a bit out of touch, but the basic approach is to take away name and form from people attached to name and form, and to take away emptiness from people who are attached to emptiness. If all boundaries are cognitive illusions, what can we say about that which has no boundaries? All we can do is point and say, "Take a look for yourself." In Portugal ND is "não-dualidade." FWIW, Lisbon (Lisboa) is an amazing city. Today we head to Cascais for five days. Lots of fun! Foi divertido. I spent three weeks studying Portuguese only to find out that European Portuguese is vastly different than Brazilian Portuguese, which is what all of the language courses teach. Haha. I had to start all over. Portugues e' uma lingua dificil (because it is accented and many syllables are simply skipped over or omitted altogether.) Yup, I hear you. I've been reading "I Am That" again recently and I marvel at the seeming contradictions of NM when talking to various questioners' but really there is no contradiction at all. He simply meets everyone where they are at. One of the sweetest exchanges I read recently was with a questioner whose mind was simple, clear and child-like. O meu lado paterno da família era dos Açores. Cresci a comer muita sopa de couve e linguica :-) Um dia destes vou falar-vos do meu bisavô, que foi raptado por piratas aos 14 anos, mas que depois escapou. Portugal parece-me lindo. Estou a usar um tradutor que traduz para português europeu que se encontra aqui. www.deepl.com/translator |
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