Everything old is new?

[unveilable]

Greetings all! I thought it was time to introduce myself.

Like many, my search started in my teens for the usual questions about life. I experimented with meditation, sensory deprivation, reading and self-inquiry in an attempt to extract any preconceived notions about what I thought to be true. There were some interesting experiences along the way but being a sensitive type with out guidance I became overwhelmed so decided to delay the search.

For several years after that the predominate feeling was of not yet ready or not yet time to dig too deep. The search largely resumed about two years ago but seemed to have intensified two months ago after having a reminiscent feeling of horrific emptiness. From that moment I felt a strong desire to find a safe place to do the work ahead. That was when I began to read this great forum.

Somehow the desire for safety has morphed into a longing to leave my corporate job and congested city life behind to spend time witnessing the natural beauty and wonders of the Earth. After a recent walk in a Florida nature preserve I experienced a sensation that I was the majesty I seek. My very desire for beauty was so palpable it felt like compelling evidence that the beauty was somehow already part of me. In that moment I felt a strong urge to turn to the person I was with and state “Its coming”. Though I worried I might sound crazy I did just that and the experience dissipated.

I have a lot of questions and am not even sure where to start. Has anyone else heard and delayed the call?

[lightmystic]

Greetings unveilable, and welcome to the board.

Considering what one is asked to let go of (everything) and dwell in that terrifying void because it's realized that there is nothing other, I think most people delay it as long as they can, until it hurts too much not to. Most of these big issues people only go through because they can't not go through them. They might get into "new age" stuff or "spiritual" stuff, but the actual letting go of this in a way that works is not romantic. It's ugly, but in a good way. It's the destruction of everything we hold dear. And there are certainly some nice experiences on the side that come and go, but that's definitely not a motivation in itself in the face of what the process is. Because those experiences are just the equivalent to a natural high. There's nothing permanent in there....except there can be....

To really spend enough time with the void, until the resistance to it fades enough that one could be with it forever and really not mind, is the beginning of the end of the world as we know it. And the beginning of freedom becoming real.....

I think you make a very insightful recognition when you recognize that all the beauty that you are feeling are YOUR feelings. And I certainly appreciate the desire for a safe place, but the more easily you can let yourself be without a "safe place" the more effectively this is going to resolve for you, and the less painfully it will. That doesn't mean not to be nice to yourself. On the contrary, that is very very important in the face of annihilation. It's hard enough to do as it is, we need all the support we can get.

So, whether you leave your job or not is whatever is right for you. Life always provides the answer one way or the other. But I discourage you from finding a "safe place." Because it's the allowing the lack of safety as a permanent possibility that really shows the safety that cannot be taken away no matter what.....

And, yes, it's definitely coming......

I'll look forward to your questions when you want to post them.....

Jan 29, 2010 14:36:18 GMT -5 unveilable said:

Greetings all! I thought it was time to introduce myself.

Like many, my search started in my teens for the usual questions about life. I experimented with meditation, sensory deprivation, reading and self-inquiry in an attempt to extract any preconceived notions about what I thought to be true. There were some interesting experiences along the way but being a sensitive type with out guidance I became overwhelmed so decided to delay the search.

For several years after that the predominate feeling was of not yet ready or not yet time to dig too deep. The search largely resumed about two years ago but seemed to have intensified two months ago after having a reminiscent feeling of horrific emptiness. From that moment I felt a strong desire to find a safe place to do the work ahead. That was when I began to read this great forum.

Somehow the desire for safety has morphed into a longing to leave my corporate job and congested city life behind to spend time witnessing the natural beauty and wonders of the Earth. After a recent walk in a Florida nature preserve I experienced a sensation that I was the majesty I seek. My very desire for beauty was so palpable it felt like compelling evidence that the beauty was somehow already part of me. In that moment I felt a strong urge to turn to the person I was with and state “Its coming”. Though I worried I might sound crazy I did just that and the experience dissipated.

I have a lot of questions and am not even sure where to start. Has anyone else heard and delayed the call?

[unveilable]

I see. Skip the romance and get to the black hole of death. This is going to be darn rough.

So as I progress the flicker of bleak emptiness will likely reoccur with frequency and duration and at some point I will have to accept it as part of Reality? How do I experience more of the void? I tried daily meditation for about 2 years but quit when I felt my energy flat-line. I read many books but I dont think this is accelerating the process by much. All Ive been able to grasp lately is that I need to more fully experience my pain.

[karen]

Hi unveilable.

I'm still seeking, so don't get me wrong.

But in my case I've found the bleakness (at least some kind of bleakness) was created by my belief that there was a reason for this life, and that belief gave comfort. In my case it was very negative, but I didn't care: as long as I had something to grasp hold of.

And taking away that reason for this life meant that that comfort was gone - which threw me into a nihilistic hangover which lasted a few years.

But reason for life? Isn't that putting the cart before the horse? In my direct experience, I reason because I'm alive! I have no knowledge of some reasoner outside myself.

[karen]

BTW, unveilable, was your meditation formal or informal? Was it a chore, or something you did whenever you found a free moment here or there?

[unveilable]

Hi Karen,

Im not entirely sure what the bleak experience was about but I do recall that afterwords I became completely disengaged at my work for about 6 weeks. I remember this feeling from the past and associate it with a black hole that is sucking away everything that is me. If thats the sensation of my ego detaching then many black holes await. After an intensely painful child and adulthood I was hoping this was going to be the easy part. Duh!

Meditation became a chore. I had been counting the breath based on a way I was taught at a zen center but changed to an insight meditation technique based on a class I took from a meditation center. That meditation involved awareness of the breath and some directive thought. Between the two ways I had been meditating 30 to 40 minutes a day 5 days a week for a good 2 years.

I petty much gave up formal practice after seeing Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche interview J. Krishnamurti about true meditation on Youtube. Now I just try to recognize what is happening in the moment in as much as that is possible but this feels like its going too slow. Ive just started Harding's techniques so hope this helps but suspect ultimately I need to find some other seekers who are willing to challenge my beliefs.

What is your practice? Do listen to any speakers? West coasters have so much available to them!

[zendancer]

Unveilable: Welcome to the board. You wrote that your desire for safety recently morphed into a desire to leave the corporate big-city life to spend more time in nature. If you are financially able to do that, and if it is not an attempt to escape from various responsibilities, it sounds like it might be an interesting option. Personally, I love being in nature alone, and I go hiking in wilderness areas quite often. The challenge you will face is how to be in the wilderness without bringing your corporate big-city mind along with you. LOL. One of the reasons I love to go hiking is that I can put everything down and just enjoy the beauty of "what is" in total silence.

As for the fear of annihilation and the scariness of the void, trust yourself in how you should proceed. Be gentle with yourself and honor whatever fears you might have. You don;t have to charge into the void and be heroic. You can slip into it gradually at whatever pace feels right to you. The void is not what you think. It only seems scary because you have to leave the safety of the known behind.

The practices that you described are okay, but I would suggest that you give up the idea of practice. Instead, think about it like this: When you were a child, you interacted with the world directly. 99% of your time was spent looking, listening, etc. You were unified with reality and there was no selfhood. Gradually you exchanged the habit of directly interacting with the world through your senses for the habit of imagining and thinking (naming, identifying, reflecting, fantasizing, cognizing, delineating, calculating, judging, evaluating, discriminating, etc). As an adult you now spend 99% of your time thinking and talking to yourself and you feel as if you are an entity inside your head looking at a world "out there." This, as you already know, is an illusion. To return to reality and the truth, you simply have to reverse the process that put you into your current situation. Simply shift your attention as often as you can to what you can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. Don;t name it or think about it. Just look and listen. If thoughts pull you into the mind (and they will), come back to seeing and hearing as soon as you realize that you're back in the mind.

You say that you practiced meditation thirty minutes a day. If so, then you were trying to be present only about 1/32 nd of each day and your attempt was formal (ie. you did this at a set time of the day in a particular way). Now, try to do this informally all during the day. If you are driving to work, stare at the road, look at the hood of the car, watch your hands on the steering wheel, focus on the other cars passing you, etc. Turn off the radio and listen to sound of the car's engine, the sound of air rushing past the windows, horns honking, etc. If you are in your office, take some breaks and stare intensely at the objects on your desk. Become silent and watch your body as it goes to the water fountain. When you go to lunch, eat more slowly and taste the food. These habits will bring you back to your body and change how you interact with the world. If you go to the wilderness, it will be even easier to look and listen because you will not be distracted by other people, TV programs, signs, and stuff that habitually drags you into the mind. If doubts arise (and they will), immediately shift your attention to what you can see and hear. If fantasies arise, same same. If you find yourself replaying past conversations in your head, same same.

Here are some beautiful lines from Leonard Jacobson in "Embracing the Present."

Two Worlds

There are two worlds.
God's world.
The world of the present moment.
And mind's world.
The world of the remembered past
and the imagined future.
Both are vast.
But only one is real.

How Do You Enter The Mind?

You enter the mind by thinking.
Whenever you think,
you take yourself into mind's world.
It does not make any difference
whether it is a perfectly intelligent thought
or a profoundly spiritual thought.
All thinking has the same effect.
It takes you into the mind's world.
A world of remembered past
and the imagined future.
A world of thought and belief.
A world of opinion and concept.
A world of memory and imagination.
A world of idea and abstraction.
A world of illusion.
If you want to come out of the mind,
then thinking will have to stop.

You Don't Have to be Present all the Time

You don;t have to be present all the time
to live an awakened life.
As long as you are grounded
in the reality of the present moment,
it is perfectly appropriate and safe
to enter the mind and the world of time.
It would be very difficult to live in the world
as it is now without entering the mind.
Someone has to fill out the tax returns.
Someone has to remember the next
appointment with the dentist.
Without the mind and its capacity
for remembering, you would be unable
to perform the simplest tasks.
You would not even know your name.
As long as you know that the truth of life
exists solely in the present moment, you are free
to enter into the illusory world of the mind at will.
I would suggest, however, that you restrict
each journey into the mind to a maximum
duration of two hours.

At the end of another poem, Jacobsen writes,

Entering into the mind
is like a journey into space.
It is wise to stay connected with home base.
Otherwise you might get lost.
You might not be able to find your way home.

Unveilable: first, you will have to learn how to be here now. You will have to lose yourself in the here and now in order to find your True Self. Then, you can enter the mind without getting lost in the illusion. You will then know who you are and you will be able to find your way home. Cheers.

[klaus]

Hi unveilable,

Changing or not changing your environment won't make any difference to your present condition. The fear and pain will still be with you.

Believe it or not you're in a good place in that you realize your own suffering and you are motivated to end it. Some realize their suffering and do nothing about it.

A good place to start is to locate the source of your suffering, is the cause from without, within or both?

[unveilable]

Thanks everybody. This has been helpful already.

There is something I am misunderstanding about practice. Is the path to an abiding awakening a matter of getting present or is it a matter of self-inquiry? I see or hear many messages about getting present but then encounter other messages about the value of inquiry and keep wondering if they are conflicting approaches. How could I be present if I am examining a thought and feeling that pulled me out of presence?

[karen]

They seem to be complimentary to each other. Not only that - being present and aware will invariably bring up stuff you have to deal with in inquiry. Forget "the rules" - do what you know works best.

Personally, I don't find arbitrary self-inquiry sessions helpful. I do it as needed. Otherwise it seems half-assed.

BTW, and to answer a previous question, my current form of meditation is looking intently at an object without labeling it. This is often things that have no clear or simple label - like the circle inside an "o" in any set of written words, shadowy objects - looking deep inside trying to see something but not anything in particular for examples. This I do with focused attention - the kind of attention I'd use if I were trying to stay awake whilst driving at a late hour - NOT the relaxing kind of meditation you see on TV. It's not fun, but it always seems to yield good stuff.

Lastly, on formal vs. informal meditation: I've never been good at chores. If I scheduled a meditation session, I'd dread it, and I wouldn't do it. Rather, I meditate as often as I think of it when its appropriate whenever possible. Even though this ends up being far far more hours in meditation than I'd get if I scheduled it - it seems easier too! It's far more compatible with my personality. And I don't think long continuous ritualistic meditation is somehow better than 10 seconds here, 5 minutes there throughout the day.

[karen]

Jan 30, 2010 8:13:43 GMT -5 unveilable said:

Do listen to any speakers? West coasters have so much available to them!

You know I haven't gone to any talks. For years I've resisted because I wanted to be able to say I did it all on my own (that's not ego is it? ha-ha-ha).

I was going to go to a Wayne Liquorman talk last week, but it was super stormy and he's now off to a world tour, and I'm planning on going to an Adyashanti intensive in June. I considered going to "The School for the Work" in Spring, but it conflicts with my work.

But I have to say that Byron Katie seems to have a lot of impact on me. I just watch the clips on Youtube and afterward for a while I'm not able to BS myself - I can just imagine her opening a can of whoop-as$ on me (Is it true?), so I get very honest with myself. (honesty is key)

Edit: for some reason my browser drops words randomly for some reason.

[zendancer]

Jan 31, 2010 12:17:55 GMT -5 unveilable said:

Thanks everybody. This has been helpful already.

There is something I am misunderstanding about practice. Is the path to an abiding awakening a matter of getting present or is it a matter of self-inquiry? I see or hear many messages about getting present but then encounter other messages about the value of inquiry and keep wondering if they are conflicting approaches. How could I be present if I am examining a thought and feeling that pulled me out of presence?

Inquiry and becoming present can both be helpful and are not contradictory. I could never get hold of the "Who am I?" inquiry, so I used it only occasionally. For a few years I did both formal and informal meditation, but after a while the informal meditation seemed more beneficial and added up to more time spent in presence than when I pursued the formal approach. I agree with Karen; go with what feels right to you. A lot of Zen students think that sitting through painful meditation sessions is beneficial, but I never saw the logic in that. Consequently, I took a much looser approach.

Asking existential questions and contemplating thoughts and feelings creates space between awareness and thoughts and forces the body/mind to seek answers at a deeper level than the intellect. There is nothing inconsistent with being present and pursuing contemplation of various existential issues. Remember, who you really are is always present and everything is happening within THAT.

[lightmystic]

Hey unveilable,

On the face of it, I would say yes, you just have to accept the void is part of reality. And I want to clarify what mean by that, because it sounds like resigning oneself to fear and unhappiness, and that's not exactly true. The void only feels like void because the mind gets overwhelmed and afraid, and then tries to run from it. The act of running from it makes it seem like void because what it is is everything. But it becomes completely overwhelming to the mind (because the mind literally cannot conceptualize infinity - because what edges can you put on it to say what it "looks like"?) and so the mind just calls it "nothing". It calls it void. So it's actually getting comfortable with what appears to be void to recognize it's inherent intimacy, the safety of "don't know"....the safety of not being able to pin anything down. In some ways, it's a radical new understanding of safety, but it certainly cannot feel safe as long as it feels like it's void. So there has to be a re-examining of it, and accepting it for what it appears to be is what allows for the details to come through.

It's like if I bought a new fancy looking couch, and my two year old, not expecting this, sees this and, when looking at it, sees a monster. To the two year old, that monster is real, and so he goes and runs and hides in the next room. Saying you have to accept the void is analogous to saying to the two year old that he has to accept the "monster". Because it's only by going back and looking at the couch that the two year old can really verify for himself that it's not a monster, which is the only way he will really be free of that fear. And, in order to do that, he has to be willing to look closely at the monster, because any partial look will just show him the image he's afraid of. In the same way, there has to be a complete willingness to be with the void until that experience of void could go on forever and be truly comfortable. Then, at that point, the acceptance of the pain/fear will be complete and it can finally be seen for what it truly is. In a sense, the fear of void is a close to void as we can get, because it puts the idea of void strongly in our mind and makes us afraid, so we are not open to seeing that it's not really void. In reality, void is just something the mind constructs sometimes when it cannot conceptualize (i.e. "box") a certain experience. So sometimes it just calls it nothing. But it isn't nothing, and it takes really being willing for it to be nothing to look at it closely and see that.

Does that make sense?

Jan 29, 2010 21:49:57 GMT -5 unveilable said:

I see. Skip the romance and get to the black hole of death. This is going to be darn rough.

So as I progress the flicker of bleak emptiness will likely reoccur with frequency and duration and at some point I will have to accept it as part of Reality? How do I experience more of the void? I tried daily meditation for about 2 years but quit when I felt my energy flat-line. I read many books but I dont think this is accelerating the process by much. All Ive been able to grasp lately is that I need to more fully experience my pain.

[lightmystic]

Unveilable,

It's not that we are resisting, but that we have BEEN resisting for a long time and are just now starting to realize it. So it's finding more and more the ways in which we've been actively taking ourselves out of the moment, so it speak. Realizing more and more that life is already perfect.... Once those ways we resist our own experience in some way are released, being in the moment is simply what's left. It's always something less, something that's not in the way anymore, never something more. The moment is just what's left to the extent that we are not resisting. And this comes about through a method of getting freer. It can be inquiry, but it does not have to be. Everyone works slightly differently, so it's ultimately, whatever works best for, and that means is making you permanently freer over time at a rate that you are happy with.

Presence is kind of a bad term, in my opinion, because it sounds like something someone does ("be here now"), but it's more like what happens when something additional is not added. There is no way to "be present," as there is nothing one can do to have that experience. What one CAN do, however, is actively start examining the ways that they are actively taking themselves out of the moment. What that means is that a feeling is bothering us now, but we cannot find a reason for it immediately so we relegate it (i.e. project it) onto that past or future. In reality, we just need to allow our resistance to the feeling to fade, and then we are no longer needing to resist that feeling, and "being in the moment" (which cannot be done) is what's left.

Do you see what I'm saying?

Jan 31, 2010 12:17:55 GMT -5 unveilable said:

Thanks everybody. This has been helpful already.

There is something I am misunderstanding about practice. Is the path to an abiding awakening a matter of getting present or is it a matter of self-inquiry? I see or hear many messages about getting present but then encounter other messages about the value of inquiry and keep wondering if they are conflicting approaches. How could I be present if I am examining a thought and feeling that pulled me out of presence?

[unveilable]

LM,

Yes on both points. Your explanation about perception of the void is fascinating and now I cant stop thinking about how to cultivate more void like experiences in order to test it out. Ive heard the analogy over and over about mistaking a rope for a snake and not relating in any way until now. You are very good at what you do.