Realize Truth Logically

[loverofall]

I can attest to the fact that the more crap that you experienced as a child the more layers of mind (conditioned patterns) you will have to undo. My mind did an excellent job of protecting me from my experience by using thoughts and images to control my feelings instead of just experiencing but the problem is once the mind learns how to control more it keeps on controlling and controlling trying to keep any uncomfortable feeling or experience away which results in most of your experience (reality) having a filter of thoughts put on it.

I have been playing with my 2 year old nehphew and a part of me is hear that was covered up by mind before. Its been a real confirmation that the mind is becoming undone as I have a blast just doing and playing with no thought.

I can see the mind come in and attempt to stir up stuff but now I can also see to just let the thoughts and feelings come because even resisting them is part of the problem. Just seeing that awareness is there no matter what is happening seems very powerful technique because otherwise I would get caught up in fighting or resisting thoughts and feelings.

[Portto]

Nice posts, ZD! Thank you!

Dec 28, 2009 15:58:10 GMT -5 zendancer said:

...
I only wish that everyone could have this much fun.
...

ZD, do you think people should have more fun?

[Portto]

Dec 29, 2009 11:00:24 GMT -5 Portto said:

ZD, do you think people should have more fun?

Porto, do you think ZD shouldn't help people have fun?

[lightmystic]

Hey ZD,

I definitely appreciate what you are saying, and I definitely relate. People want to go back to childhood, but childhood is not always that happy of an experience. There is surely more openness there, but there is also complete identification with the self, which makes things very overwhelming and painful. The second childhood is truly what's so wonderful....
It's cool that you had a stabilizing childhood, as I was actually quite unhappy most of my childhood, and did not have a stable center in myself. I was expected to and (and was trying to) please others. It was actually that suffering that helped propel me into getting out of the cycle and was tremendously helpful in integrating who I am as well....

It just goes to show again, I guess, that Enlightenment is not a function of the personality.

And, interestingly, I have no wish to go and do it over again. I do want a happy childhood, I want a fulfilled adulthood. And that's exactly what's there...

The pain of childhood is as if a memory that happened to someone else, but it feels that there is deep meaning in that too....

And, I very much appreciate what you are saying about the childlike having fun. I often wonder how anyone could have as much fun as I have on a daily basis! Absolutely ridiculous.

When I first awoke, talking about it was amazingly integrating for me, just to force myself to focus attention on what it was that I was experiencing and really get clear on it, let it really sink in deep. But, over time, there does seem to be more and more enjoyment in the silence of it all. That says more than I could possibly say verbally, even though the silence does come under the words. It's still too awkward and clunky a describing mechanism. Although I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy that too.

There is something, though, about sitting in that silence, that Totalness, that's so sweet and simple and subtle. It just completes the picture so fully....

Dec 28, 2009 15:58:10 GMT -5 zendancer said:

Klaus: A few more thoughts along the same line as my last post. I was a real lucky kid. I grew up in a family where I was given lots of freedom to do whatever I wanted to do. My parents didn't have many expectations for me, so I got to pursue my many interests and they were very supportive of all my interests. I collected bones, feathers, fossils, arrowheads, leaves, minerals, coins, and tons of other things. I built models, playhouses, forts, science projects, go-carts, etc. I went on archaeological, paleontological, and mineralogical expeditions with older students. I was a full-class science nerd and I built high-powered rockets, a telespectroscope, and Heathkits galore. I had my own personal laboratory with big transformers and oscilloscopes and tons of dangerous chemicals. IOW I always got to do my own thing. I never second-guessed myself about anything until my second year of college when I began to think about reality, meaning, purpose, and thinking itself. It all went downhill from there. LOL. I became a certified intellectual and got totally lost in the funhouse. After I began practicing silence, had an enlightenment experience, and went on a few retreats, I got my true direction back. It took many years of silence, but eventually my body kicked my mind out of the control booth and I returned to the kind of world I lived in as a kid.

The second time I became a kid, however, things were different. The first time I was totally self-centered and everything revolved around me, me, me. The second time the whole thing was totally empty because there was no me. This time is a lot more fun because I get to play almost all the time, but I care what happens to everyone around me. I only wish that everyone could have this much fun.

Many people are not as lucky as I was. I have friends who had terrible childhoods and parents who laid all kinds of heavy trips on them. I can see why they would have more trouble getting free as a result of their past conditioning. Many children never develop a strong center because they're trying to fulfill the needs of the people who surround them. Most of the people I know worry about what other people (and especially family members) think. This sort of thing rarely concerns me at all because I am so grounded in the truth of who I am--in the truth of "what is." This body knows what it likes to do, and it does what it does. The whole thing is quite humorous, almost hysterical. It's like watching something happen according to some kind of hidden instructions. "It" loves to follow the stock market, design and build homes, do accounting, hike in the woods, hunt fossils, read books, ski, and a thousand other things. It occasionally has problems, but they seem relatively minor in the total scheme of things. This is one of the reasons It always feels so thankful.

I wrote these thoughts because it occurred to me that I grew up in a way that allowed me to be who I was from the earliest age, without adult expectations. This gave me a strong center. Later, I lost it when I began thinking about thinking and moved from body-knowing to head-knowing. The head-knowing ended in 1999 when my spiritual search came to an end. I then understood, for the first time, in some complete embodied way, what was going on. I was then able to relax and go with the flow because all questions had ended and everything was profoundly empty.

These days I find that I am not interested in thinking too much. One day a few weeks ago someone asked some questions on this board that caused me to spend several hours thinking about the issues and trying to decide how to explain some things. Afterwards, I felt that I had thought too hard and too long, and all I wanted to do was sit in silence for many hours. It was as if the body needed to shake off the effects of all that thinking and get back to stillness where there is peace of mind. I sat in silence for several hours for several nights in a row, and it was the first time I had done that sort of thing in a long time. I'll dig up an old poem about this subject and post it here if I can find. Cheers.

[zendancer]

Porto: I have no idea what other people should do, but I'm sure they would have lots more fun if they could let go of their attachments to their ideas, especially ideas about "shoulds" and "oughts." When folks get attached to their ideas, it causes untold amounts of suffering. Rotary Clubs have a rule that members should never discuss politics or religion while eating lunch because ideas about these topics cause so much division and animosity.

A woman called me yesterday to tell me about her "Christmas from hell." Her in-laws got into a big fight at their Christmas party because everybody had strong opinions about what everybody else in the family should be doing. This is typical of what minds do. When minds are in control, you can count on lots of anger, guilt, dissatisfaction, and unhappiness. Mothers, for one example, often have incredible expectations for their daughters. They think their daughters don't dress correctly, or do their hair correctly, or wear the right makeup, or give them enough attention, or cook the right foods, or entertain correctly, ad infinitum. It's no wonder that a lot of daughters don't enjoy visiting their mothers!

After Eckhart Tolle's wakeup experience, he felt wonderful, but he didn't know why. Later, he realized that it was because 80% of his prior thinking had disappeared.

Imagine thoughts as if they were vaporous things that float in the sky above your head. Every time you have a thought imagine that it floats off into the sky. Now, with all of your thoughts floating above you like a distant flock of translucent birds, take a look around. What's not to like? Look at the wonder of "what is." It's fantastic and unimaginable. Pure awareness, undisturbed by thoughts, is joyful, light, and free. Something unknown is looking at something unknown, and playing in that unknown-ness is just too much fun. Cheers.

[loverofall]

The oughts and shoulds are very common traps for me. I want my family to do things healthier and better but that only slows the progress in me and them. Oughts and shoulds work against unconditional love.

ZD: Good analogy with the floating thoughts. Unknown looking at unknown. I am putting that on my screen saver. That about sums it all up.

LM: I can relate. The farther along, the less my childhhood seems like my childhood and that includes some very good times. None of it is mine. I want the happy and free adulthood and the only sensible path is to become free of the mind.

[karen]

Dec 29, 2009 9:01:37 GMT -5 loverofall said:

I can attest to the fact that the more crap that you experienced as a child the more layers of mind (conditioned patterns) you will have to undo.[snip]

I can 2nd this. I seem to be still falling into old mental habits and falling back into suffering. And so I have to deal with these - shameful memories for example when they come up. To pretend they are not there isn't productive.

But the line I draw is to not pursue my mental habits with the hopes of understanding, but rather just deal with them as they come up. This is way easier said than done as this is another one of those mental habits I still seem to fall into - trying to figure things out.

It's funny though when I do have razor sharp attention the tricks the mind uses become apparent. Like just yesterday, I was feeling very unfocused and day dreaming and feeling generally poor. And when I was out hiking I started grabbing any object on the ground ahead of me with my attention and say to myself: I will only pay attention to walking and that object until I reach that object (say a twig). And when I'd get to that twig, I'd glance ahead at something else - anything else - just the first object in my view ahead like a rock, and repeat over and over along the trail.

I started to feel great about 10 minutes into it. With the feeling great came the mind popping out all sorts of captivating ideas (inventions and such - they are the most annoying since I never doing anything with them). But since I was very present and focused I was able to dismiss these tempting side routes with relative ease as I was keenly aware I was just coming out of a side route.

I think I'm going to do that meditation more.

[shiokara]

Many people are not as lucky as I was. I have friends who had terrible childhoods and parents who laid all kinds of heavy trips on them. I can see why they would have more trouble getting free as a result of their past conditioning. Many children never develop a strong center because they're trying to fulfill the needs of the people who surround them. Most of the people I know worry about what other people (and especially family members) think. This sort of thing rarely concerns me at all because I am so grounded in the truth of who I am--in the truth of "what is." This body knows what it likes to do, and it does what it does. The whole thing is quite humorous, almost hysterical. It's like watching something happen according to some kind of hidden instructions. "It" loves to follow the stock market, design and build homes, do accounting, hike in the woods, hunt fossils, read books, ski, and a thousand other things. It occasionally has problems, but they seem relatively minor in the total scheme of things. This is one of the reasons It always feels so thankful.

I wrote these thoughts because it occurred to me that I grew up in a way that allowed me to be who I was from the earliest age, without adult expectations. This gave me a strong center. Later, I lost it when I began thinking about thinking and moved from body-knowing to head-knowing. The head-knowing ended in 1999 when my spiritual search came to an end. I then understood, for the first time, in some complete embodied way, what was going on. I was then able to relax and go with the flow because all questions had ended and everything was profoundly empty.

You write this in the way that it is evident that you were fortunate in the way you were raised. What about the unfortunate ones with the weird upbringing? And it sounds that you too looked at your life up to 1999 with logic and found the answer. But you did use logic to get to the doorway of the truth. I think this is what yumcha was saying.

[zendancer]

Karen: What you described is probably my favorite form of meditation. While hiking on a mountain trail near my home, I focus strongly on one object after another as they come into sight. Sometimes I get so interested in what I'm looking at that I stop and just stare for a while. Maybe its the way some tree roots intertwine with the rocks and boulders, or maybe its a strange rock formation, or the colors and textures of various mosses and flowers. As you say, after a while the mind just disappears into the isness, and if thoughts arise, they are seen as if they were clouds passing by.

Sometimes I get out of my car and start off hiking while thinking about some business problems, but as soon as I shift my focus to what surrounds me on the trail, the problems all disappear. One day last week I walked off the trail to look at some massive sandstone boulders covered with moss and leaves. As I walked between the huge monoliths, I thought to myself, "No cathedral in the world could equal this." Later, I sat down on a rock overlook about a thousand feet above the valley floor. I could see the Smoky Mountains eighty miles in the distance. There were several small farms spread out in the valley below me with hundreds of grazing cows, and in the air above me two big buzzardhawks slowly circled on the updrafts. Timeless, empty, silent, and serene. I stayed until the sun sank behind the mountain I was on, and left while there was still enough light to see the trail. Five minutes later I surprised a group of five or six deer that were standing under some trees in the gathering darkness. They suddenly bounded off through the woods, white tails flashing, and then silence returned. Beautiful.

[yumcha]

Zendancer wrote:

“Most of us live in our heads, so we are usually separated from the deepest truth of who we are. When we face a problem that can't be solved rationally, we have to get in touch with the core of our being to see-through whatever issue confronts us. Our bodies always know what to do, but we often have to still the mind in order to tap into our body's direct knowledge. It is only then that our body's knowledge rises to the level of conscious understanding".

“As one's mind becomes silent, and the intellect becomes a servant rather than a master, one always knows what to do. If a quandary appears, one only needs to sit down, become silent, and allow the universe to reveal the truth through the body”.

You can get there from here.

[zendancer]

Shiokara: I think Yumcha was using the word "logic" in a different way than I do, but I think we're both pointing to the same thing. In the way that I use language I would say that I never found the answer to a single existential question using logic or thought. Until I somewhat accidentally discovered a thought-free source of knowledge and understanding, I relied upon thought like everyone else. Yes, my thinking had made me realize that something had to be wrong with what I had been taught about the world, but it didn't help me understand what that wrongness was. Thought generated hundreds of existential questions, but it never helped me find a single answer. It was only after I shifted my attention from thoughts to what I could see, hear, and directly experience through my body, that answers began to appear.

After I had an initial kensho experience in 1984, I never again tried to find the answer to an existential question through thought or logic. I knew that it was hopeless. My 1984 experience showed me that everything I wanted to know was available through a different source of perception that could be accessed through silent attentiveness. I immediately started going on silent retreats and practicing many different forms of meditation. I worked to break the habit of reflective thought because I realized what that habit had unconsciously done to me (caused me to live in my head rather than the real world).

One of the reasons that I do so much writing about non-duality is to tell people how they can save a lot of time--by leaving thoughts behind and shifting attention to direct sensory perception. All of us are directly connected to God (or whatever we choose to call the Absolute), but that connection is obscured by reflective thought. When we suspend thoughts, the truth shines through. As Seng S'ten stated so eloquently, "Give up thinking, and there is nothing you will not be able to know."

Yes, some people have terrible childhood experiences, but the good news is that those terrible experiences can be transcended. As Lightmystic indicated, sometimes bad childhood memories, alone, prompt people to start searching for the truth.

[zendancer]

Yumcha: You wrote, "You can get there from here." Where is here?

[klaus]

zendancer,

While I appreciate your reply perhaps how I phrased my question wasn't specific enough. My question pointed to the actual physicality of the body/mind in the physical world. Here I'm not speaking of consensual reality but of the "stuff" of the physical world without concepts, imagination etc.

You use the term "body's direct knowledge" of always knowing what to do. But is that always the case? For example I smoke, my body/mind reacts in opposite ways to smoking-coughing, diminished breathing capacity-and accepts it for the physical pleasure that nicotine gives the body/mind.
Does that come from the" body's direct knowlrdge?" In other words how do you explain physical addictions in relation to the" body's direct knowledge?"
I understand the body/mind has a tremendous amount of knowledge that functions below the level of consciousness-the autonomic system, the mind being aware of everything in the direct enviorment, dreams etc.

How does the "body's direct knowledge" relate to "core being" if by "core being," to use a metaphor, is that which anchors the "stuff" of the body/mind to the physcial world?

Can the body/mind be physically enlightened, felt in our bones so to speak?

[zendancer]

Klaus: Sorry, I didn't interpret the question correctly. Yes and yes. What I meant is that the body always acts as it must, regardless of how we might want to think about it or interpret its actions. If you removed all personal volition, sat down in a chair, and decided not to "direct" the body (one of the biggest illusions out there), your body might get up out of the chair and go smoke a cigarette. This has nothing to do with what's good for the body or anything like that. I simply meant that it will act without someone directing it. Awareness can stand back and watch what is happening without the illusion of direction.

My original intention in this line of thought was to illuminate something different. Many people suffer from a kind of indecision paralysis. They think, "I don;t know what to do." If they are willing to become silent and watch what happens, they will discover that their body knows what to do, and they can watch it act. It may sit in silence and then go to the bathroom, or go for a walk, or rake some leaves, etc. If they remain aware, but silent and non-participatory, they will be practicing a powerful form of meditation that may afford some insight into what's really happening.

Something that always cracks me up is when someone says, "I've never discovered what I'm supposed to be doing in life." I'm always tempted to say in response, "Well, tell me what you did today, starting as soon as you woke up." Whatever they did was exactly what they were supposed to be doing in life! Their body knew precisely what to do (get up, shower, get dressed, brush teeth, fix breakfast, etc), but they couldn't see or accept the obvious. Usually they mean, "I've never discovered some ideal kind of full-time work that pays lots of money and is also enjoyable." Wow! There are so many abstractions involved in that comment that all one can say is, "Put it all down!" If they would just focus upon what is happening moment to moment long enough to get connected (get body and mind unified), then they could be happy regardless of what they are doing.

Finally, yes, enlightenment/freedom/equanimity can be felt in the bones. It has to be felt that deeply in order for true freedom to occur. It takes that kind of felt depth for real "lightness of being" to appear. Selfhood is a heavy burden; when it finally evaporates (is seen to be totally non-existent), there is a lot more laughter.

[yumcha]

I probably should first clear up the misunderstanding of the term “logic”. Zendancer, you persist in interpreting logic as the science of reasoning, and you are correct.

However, logic is also used as a particular system or method of reasoning. In my case, I refer to logic as following a systematic process of analysis, in which we follow the path of deductive reasoning to a solution.

Now, before we re-visit the past, and discuss once again the fruitless pursuit of deductive reasoning in the quest for Truth, let me just say once again, the method I suggested is merely a way to focus the mind, of which there are many, and initially quite necessary.

I see that we agree on the process after the mind has been focused, calmed and silenced, with which I posted your response verbatim. OK, my reference to “you can get there from here”, simply means that this discussion has ample elements in which one can find one’s way to Truth. In fact the whole process from start to finish is contained within this one thread of discussion. Do you agree?