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Kensho
Oct 25, 2018 10:21:00 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Oct 25, 2018 10:21:00 GMT -5
Since it's an experience can someone describe theirs. Curious. When I went to Zen Temple talk of kensho or satori was discouraged. Not interested in picking it apart. Just curious to see if I've experienced anything like it. I've experienced mushin as ZD describes it, quite often.
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Kensho
Oct 25, 2018 10:29:26 GMT -5
Post by Reefs on Oct 25, 2018 10:29:26 GMT -5
We must have described that several hundred times already. Just look into ZD's post dumpster under 'CC' or 'CC experience' and you'll find some descriptions there, in my post dumpster as well. Good luck and happy dumpster diving!
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Kensho
Oct 25, 2018 10:30:40 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Oct 25, 2018 10:30:40 GMT -5
We must have described that several hundred times already. Just look into ZD's post dumpster under 'CC' or 'CC experience' and you'll find some descriptions there, in my post dumpster as well. Good luck and happy dumpster diving! Thanks.
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Kensho
Oct 25, 2018 10:43:14 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Oct 25, 2018 10:43:14 GMT -5
We must have described that several hundred times already. Just look into ZD's post dumpster under 'CC' or 'CC experience' and you'll find some descriptions there, in my post dumpster as well. Good luck and happy dumpster diving! Thanks. Found some really cool descriptions. Never have experienced anything like it.
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Kensho
Oct 25, 2018 10:51:11 GMT -5
Post by Reefs on Oct 25, 2018 10:51:11 GMT -5
We must have described that several hundred times already. Just look into ZD's post dumpster under 'CC' or 'CC experience' and you'll find some descriptions there, in my post dumpster as well. Good luck and happy dumpster diving! Thanks. Found some really cool descriptions. Never have experienced anything like it. To me it seems kensho, in general, is a lot more common among spiritual folks than satori. The Abraham-Hicks teachings and Seth material I sometimes talk about all build on that realization. If you go into the spiritual teacher section of this forum and look into the 'Seth quotes' thread you'll find some kensho related stuff there, too. In non-duality circles, however, satori seems to be the more dominant realization.
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Kensho
Oct 25, 2018 11:00:41 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Oct 25, 2018 11:00:41 GMT -5
Thanks. Found some really cool descriptions. Never have experienced anything like it. To me it seems kensho, in general, is a lot more common among spiritual folks than satori. The Abraham-Hicks teachings and Seth material I sometimes talk about all build on that realization. If you go into the spiritual teacher section of this forum and look into the 'Seth quotes' thread you'll find some kensho related stuff there, too. In non-duality circles, however, satori seems to be the more dominant realization. Thanks. I'll take a look at those. In reading the "I am the world" thread, it seemed kensho was a temporary experience where satori was more permanent. Though some folk slide out of satori.
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Kensho
Oct 25, 2018 11:21:22 GMT -5
Post by Reefs on Oct 25, 2018 11:21:22 GMT -5
To me it seems kensho, in general, is a lot more common among spiritual folks than satori. The Abraham-Hicks teachings and Seth material I sometimes talk about all build on that realization. If you go into the spiritual teacher section of this forum and look into the 'Seth quotes' thread you'll find some kensho related stuff there, too. In non-duality circles, however, satori seems to be the more dominant realization. Thanks. I'll take a look at those. In reading the "I am the world" thread, it seemed kensho was a temporary experience where satori was more permanent. Though some folk slide out of satori. You have to distinguish between the realization and the experience. The experience will come and go and may reoccur in some cases but the realization is permanent. The realization is the important part because it is the realization that will change your entire being, not the experience. Realizations will affect you on a visceral level which means it will carry over into your everyday life. That's why the word 'realization' is held in such high esteem on the forum and the word 'experience' has a rather bad reputation in comparison. But in the end, it's your day to day experience where it counts. That's why some of us are skeptical of so-called realizations that don't have any effect on everyday life experience.
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Kensho
Oct 25, 2018 11:30:45 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Oct 25, 2018 11:30:45 GMT -5
Thanks. I'll take a look at those. In reading the "I am the world" thread, it seemed kensho was a temporary experience where satori was more permanent. Though some folk slide out of satori. You have to distinguish between the realization and the experience. The experience will come and go and may reoccur in some cases but the realization is permanent. The realization is the important part because it is the realization that will change your entire being, not the experience. Realizations will affect you on a visceral level which means it will carry over into your everyday life. That's why the word 'realization' is held in such high esteem on the forum and the word 'experience' has a rather bad reputation in comparison. But in the end, it's your day to day experience where it counts. That's why some of us are skeptical of so-called realizations that don't have any effect on everyday life experience. Gotcha. I have a conceptual understanding of SR, from reading and listening to satsangs. But it does NOT have an effect on every day life. However zazen I can say does impact my daily life, but that effect comes and goes.
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Kensho
Oct 25, 2018 12:40:22 GMT -5
Post by Reefs on Oct 25, 2018 12:40:22 GMT -5
You have to distinguish between the realization and the experience. The experience will come and go and may reoccur in some cases but the realization is permanent. The realization is the important part because it is the realization that will change your entire being, not the experience. Realizations will affect you on a visceral level which means it will carry over into your everyday life. That's why the word 'realization' is held in such high esteem on the forum and the word 'experience' has a rather bad reputation in comparison. But in the end, it's your day to day experience where it counts. That's why some of us are skeptical of so-called realizations that don't have any effect on everyday life experience. Gotcha. I have a conceptual understanding of SR, from reading and listening to satsangs. But it does NOT have an effect on every day life. However zazen I can say does impact my daily life, but that effect comes and goes. Don't underestimate the effect of reading and listening. I've been listening to the A-H stuff for almost 10 years and it really is some kind of slow deprogramming what has happened. Seth actually talks in this way about his method. But it's not a realization in the sense we use the term here, of course. But it does have some effect on daily life in the long run. And it also helps in the post realization reorganization process of your mental maps. And similar to zazen, there's an accumulative effect but it does come and go, too. And that's only logical because it is based on focus, where you put your attention in the moment. So essentially it is a moment to moment thing. Realizations, however, are not based on focus. They happen prior to mind and therefore not in time. That's a whole different way of perception.
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Post by zendancer on Oct 25, 2018 12:44:57 GMT -5
Z: kensho can be anything from a quick glimpse of the infinite, or it can be a profoundly deep experience involving numerous realizations and a complete psychological revolution. As Reefs has pointed out, the basic realization is that what we call "reality" is a unified whole, and that separateness is a cognitive illusion. The immediate experience may only last a moment, 5 minutes, or several hours, but the aftermath can last for months of even years. Here's how a friend of mine, Flora Courtois, described a kensho awakening:
....sitting quietly on the edge of my bed and gazing at a small desk, not thinking of anything at all, in a moment too short to measure, the universe turned on its axis and my search (for truth) was over.The desk at which I'd been so thoughtlessly gazing had totally and radically changed.. It appeared now with a clarity, a depth of three-dimensionality, a freshness I had never imagined possible. At the same time, in a way that is utterly indescribable, all my questions and doubts were gone as effortlessly as chaff in the wind. I knew everything and all at once, yet not in the sense that I had ever known anything before. All things were the same in my room yet totally changed. Still sitting in wonder on the edge of my bed, one of the first things I realized was the focus of my sight seemed to have changed; it had sharpened to an infinitely small point, which moved ceaselessly in paths totally free of the old accustomed ones, as if flowing from a new source. What on earth had happened? So released from tension, so ecstatically light did I feel, I seemed to float down the hall to the bathroom to look at my face in the mirror. The pupils of my eyes were dark, dilated and brimming with mirth. With wondrous relief, I began to laugh from the soles of my feet upward. .....over a period of a many months a ripening took place, a deepening and unfolding of this experience, which filled me with wonder and gratitude at every moment. The foundations of my world had fallen. I had plunged into a numinous oneness which had obliterated all fixed distinctions including that of within and without. A Presence had absorbed the universe including myself, and to this I surrendered in absolute confidence......Sometimes, when alone, I danced as freely as I did as a child. The whole world seemed to have reversed itself, to have turned outside in. Activity flowed effortlessly, and to my amazement, seemingly without thought. Instead of following my old sequence of learning, thinking, planning, then acting, action had taken precedence and whatever was learned was surprisingly incidental. Yet nothing ever seemed to go out of bounds; there was no alternation between self-control and letting go, but rather a perfect rightness and spontaneity to all this flowing activity. This new kind of knowing was so pure and unadorned, so delicate, that nothing in the language of my past could express it.Neither sense, nor feeling, nor imagination contained it, yet all were contained in it. In some indefinable way, I knew with absolute certainty the universe with its changeless unity and harmony in change, and the inseparability of all opposites. (I'll continue this, but we're having power outages here, and I'll post this before it disappears)
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Kensho
Oct 25, 2018 13:17:22 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Oct 25, 2018 13:17:22 GMT -5
Z: kensho can be anything from a quick glimpse of the infinite, or it can be a profoundly deep experience involving numerous realizations and a complete psychological revolution. As Reefs has pointed out, the basic realization is that what we call "reality" is a unified whole, and that separateness is a cognitive illusion. The immediate experience may only last a moment, 5 minutes, or several hours, but the aftermath can last for months of even years. Here's how a friend of mine, Flora Courtois, described her kensho: ....sitting quietly on the edge of my bed and gazing at a small desk, not thinking of anything at all, in a moment too short to measure, the universe turned on its axis and my search (for truth) was over.The desk at which I'd been so thoughtlessly gazing had totally and radically changed.. It appeared now with a clarity, a depth of three-dimensionality, a freshness I had never imagined possible. At the same time, in a way that is utterly indescribable, all my questions and doubts were gone as effortlessly as chaff in the wind. I knew everything and all at once, yet not in the sense that I had ever known anything before. All things were the same in my room yet totally changed. Still sitting in wonder on the edge of my bed, one of the first things I realized was the focus of my sight seemed to have changed; it had sharpened to an infinitely small point, which moved ceaselessly in paths totally free of the old accustomed ones, as if flowing from a new source. What on earth had happened? So released from tension, so ecstatically light did I feel, I seemed to float down the hall to the bathroom to look at my face in the mirror. The pupils of my eyes were dark, dilated and brimming with mirth. With wondrous relief, I began to laugh from the soles of my feet upward. .....over a period of a many months a ripening took place, a deepening and unfolding of this experience, which filled me with wonder and gratitude at every moment. The foundations of my world had fallen. I had plunged into a numinous oneness which had obliterated all fixed distinctions including that of within and without. A Presence had absorbed the universe including myself, and to this I surrendered in absolute confidence......Sometimes, when alone, I danced as freely as I did as a child. The whole world seemed to have reversed itself, to have turned outside in. Activity flowed effortlessly, and to my amazement, seemingly without thought. Instead of following my old sequence of learning, thinking, planning, then acting, action had taken precedence and whatever was learned was surprisingly incidental. Yet nothing ever seemed to go out of bounds; there was no alternation between self-control and letting go, but rather a perfect rightness and spontaneity to all this flowing activity. This new kind of knowing was so pure and unadorned, so delicate, that nothing in the language of my past could express it.Neither sense, nor feeling, nor imagination contained it, yet all were contained in it. In some indefinable way, I knew with absolute certainty the universe with its changeless unity and harmony in change, and the inseparability of all opposites. (I'll continue this, but we're having power outages here, and I'll post this before it disappears) Silver seems to describe a perhaps more fleeting experience during mediation: Silver's jenpa's response to silver is what I was told to do regarding any "bizarre" experience during meditation, but I've never experienced anything like Silver either. Just the mushin which can sometimes last for hours and has lasted for days. I can also bring on that state without meditating. It's quite peaceful.
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Post by zendancer on Oct 25, 2018 13:30:56 GMT -5
Kensho continued:
It was as if, before all this occurred, "I" had been a fixed point inside my head looking out at a world out there, a separate and comparatively flat world. The periphery of awareness had not come to light, yet neither fixed periphery nor center existed as such. A paradoxical quality seemed to permeate all existence. Feeling myself centered as never before, at the same time I knew the whole universe to be centered at every point. Having plunged to the center of emptiness, having lost all purposefulness in the old sense, I had never felt so one-pointed, so clear and decisive. Freed from separateness, feeling one with the universe, everything including myself had become at once unique and equal. If God was the word for this Presence in which I was absorbed, then everything was either holy or nothing; no distinction was possible. All was meaningful, complete as it was, each bird, bud, midge, mole, atom, crystal, of total importance in itself. As in the notes of a great symphony, nothing was large or small, nothing of more or less importance to the whole. I now saw that wholeness and holiness are one. ......I knew now that eternity is here always, that there is no higher, no deeper, no separate past or future time or place. How could love be other than this all-encompassing oneness to which we can do nothing but open ourselves? I felt that I was done forever with seeking, all philosophic and religious doctrines, all fear of dying or concern for the future, all need for authority other than this. If I could continue in this state of "Open Vision," I felt certain that whatever happened, everything would be right just as it was. Years before I had sought a rule that would apply to everything I did, even to washing the dishes. Now I simply washed dishes. In the most simple of bodily feelings and the most ordinary of daily tasks, living was transformed. I had never felt so completely whole and in one piece, or enjoyed my bodily feelings so much. Breathing had changed, had become deeper, more rhythmical. Hands, eyes, voice all seemed quieter, more relaxed. My energy, eating and even handwriting changed. As for my relations to others, another person now filled my shoes. Laughter and delight seemed to fill my life. Somehow I had become more human, more ordinary, more friendly and at ease with all kinds of people. Apparently I appeared happy and smiling too, for strangers often came up and spoke to me. .......But of all the changes that had occurred, the one that seemed to me in some mysterious way to be the key to everything else was the change in vision. It was as if some inner eye, some ancient center of awareness, which extended equally and all at once in all directions without limit and which had been there all along, had been restored. This inner vision seemed to be anchored in infinity in a way that was detached from immediate sight and, yet at the same time, had a profound effect on sight. Walking along the street I was aware of the street flowing past and beneath me, the trees or buildings moving past all around, and the sky moving above as if I were immersed in one flowing whole. A childlike unknowing pervaded perception. The immediate world had acquired a new depth and clarity of color and form, and unalloyed freshness and unexpectedness. Rooted in the present, every moment opened to eternity. Along with this, there was sharp single pointedness to the focus of attention which caused me to feel that I was looking straight and deeply into whatever entered my attention. Yet paradoxically I felt blind. This is difficult to describe. It was as if my attention were now rooted in some deeper center so that my everyday sight, my eyes, were released from their former tension and were now free. Another incidental change I noticed was that no matter in what direction I looked, no shadow of my nose or face ever appeared in the clear field of sight, as apparently it had occasionally done before......
There's lots more, but this gives the flavor of what Flora experienced, and how everything changed in her life in one dramatic instant. Her "enlightened" state of mind described here continued for many years and it became her "new normal." Only many years later, after doing graduate work in the field of psychology, did her previous state of mind involving reflective thought reassert itself, and she lost her "open vision" and sense of free-flowingness. 25 years after her awakening, she met ZM Yasutani Roshi, and he explained what he considered to be the role of zazen in triggering such an awakening and in the maintenance of continued clarity.
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Kensho
Oct 25, 2018 15:40:46 GMT -5
Post by zendancer on Oct 25, 2018 15:40:46 GMT -5
The common conception of kensho is that it's a mystical experience lasting some definite period of time, but it can be even stranger than that. In many cases, such as what happened to Flora Courtois at the age of about 18, everything changed in one split second, and from that point on, she lived in a different world in a different way than anything that had preceded it. Another good example of this is what happened to Paul Morgan-Somers. At the age of 15 he felt like he needed to sit quietly for a moment, and when he did so, he suddenly fell into what he calls "the ocean," or THIS, and that began a love affair with "what is" that never ended. For those who don't know about Paul, his talk of Feb 19, 2016 titled "An Evening with Paul Morgan-Somers, is a good introduction, and one can capture at least a vague sense of what he's pointing to even if there's been no direct experience of it.
Older people more commonly describe an initial disintegration experience, or a shattering of ordinary reality, that precedes an immersion in THIS, and this may be because older people are more strongly conditioned or more strongly attached to their ideas about reality.
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Kensho
Oct 25, 2018 20:27:10 GMT -5
Post by laughter on Oct 25, 2018 20:27:10 GMT -5
Since it's an experience can someone describe theirs. Curious. When I went to Zen Temple talk of kensho or satori was discouraged. Not interested in picking it apart. Just curious to see if I've experienced anything like it. I've experienced mushin as ZD describes it, quite often. From how I've come to understand mushin, I've found that it can be a matter of degree and can relate it to lots of different types of experiences, mostly work and play. I got promoted from dishwasher to cook when I was a 23 year-old college student 'cause of how impressed the chef was with his floor every morning. If you feel like sharing, I'd be curious to know what usually precipitates it for you, although I can only relate to the shaking part in experiences that really shouldn't be shared either on an open forum like this, or really, much anywhere else but between two consenting adults. I've looked to the Zen culture descriptions of kensho over the years to help explain for me what happened after I read Tolle, and I've found quite a bit there, but am acutely aware of how that culture is essentially self-contained, so that projecting what I think my experience has been onto it is something I have to take with a grain of salt. This is interesting how your Soto crew discouraged talk of it, and is concordant with the casual reading I've done on the two different variants. The fact that Low includes Haikun in the title of his book about kensho seems to me to reinforce the distinction, as the interwebs report that we was a Rinzai revivalist.
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Kensho
Oct 25, 2018 21:49:32 GMT -5
Post by Deleted on Oct 25, 2018 21:49:32 GMT -5
Since it's an experience can someone describe theirs. Curious. When I went to Zen Temple talk of kensho or satori was discouraged. Not interested in picking it apart. Just curious to see if I've experienced anything like it. I've experienced mushin as ZD describes it, quite often. From how I've come to understand mushin, I've found that it can be a matter of degree and can relate it to lots of different types of experiences, mostly work and play. I got promoted from dishwasher to cook when I was a 23 year-old college student 'cause of how impressed the chef was with his floor every morning. If you feel like sharing, I'd be curious to know what usually precipitates it for you, although I can only relate to the shaking part in experiences that really shouldn't be shared either on an open forum like this, or really, much anywhere else but between two consenting adults. I've looked to the Zen culture descriptions of kensho over the years to help explain for me what happened after I read Tolle, and I've found quite a bit there, but am acutely aware of how that culture is essentially self-contained, so that projecting what I think my experience has been onto it is something I have to take with a grain of salt. This is interesting how your Soto crew discouraged talk of it, and is concordant with the casual reading I've done on the two different variants. The fact that Low includes Haikun in the title of his book about kensho seems to me to reinforce the distinction, as the interwebs report that we was a Rinzai revivalist. Mushin can happen anywhere doing anything. It's happened when cleaning out my birds' cages. It has happened at my gym. What I'm doing has flow to it maybe because the mind isn't interfering. Every step just happens. I am very relaxed even while exerting myself. It has happened in meditation and carried over for the rest of the day. The first time it happened it lasted three days. I get very quiet. Everyone notices it. As I've said everyone asks me if I'm angry and I tell them no. I feel if I try to explain what is happening it will stop. I can clue my wife in by saying "I'm centered." And she'll stop pestering me. My wife says my speech is slower and my voice deepens.When I start to come out of it, it feels like another person, that is not me. The other day I was in that state watching TV. What I was watching seemed funny. My wife asked if I didn't find it funny. I told her I did. Then she asked me why I wasn't laughing. I don't know. It was almost as if there was no need to laugh. I'm not blissed out or happy pappy, but I can say life never feels better, everything is smooth and effortless. The other weird thing is when I watch TV and the wife isn't around, if some part of a show is too intense, I change the channel. While in mushin I don't. I'm sure it's fairly common. I think the trigger is usually observing the mind. The phrase "being aware of being aware" comes to mind. I kind of slide into that state every once in a while being aware of being aware. Mind's goal now is to try to figure out how to make it permanent.
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