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Post by loverofall on Jul 10, 2010 18:37:24 GMT -5
Question: From your post it is very clear that the identification with thinking and thought is very strong and emotions are avoided.
Defined personality as an expression of thought and left out any reference to feeling/emotion
Projected a fearful future that stopping thought would stop you from earning a living.
Can't see how you can perceive reality different than what it is. That would be what you focus on and how it makes you feel and then what imaginative and reflective thoughts and feelings are fueled by the focus.
You could read this email and think I was being helpful or you could read it and think I was being a pain. Your perception would be different from reality. Does this email create any feelings in you and what thoughts are created by the feelings?
Just trying to get you to look deeper at who you really are.
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Post by question on Jul 10, 2010 19:37:00 GMT -5
Question: I have a good friend that is extremely intelligent and loves philosophy. I thought he would enjoy this path but it completely stumps him. Actually, it scares him because he is so identified with his thinking. Emotions and intuition are suppressed by the conceptual mind. The intuition/feeling/aware side is important to develop more. A fun practice is to wait for a decision to pop up instead of using thinking or planning. What feeling makes you come to post in this board? What are you feeling right now? If these questions bother you or are difficult then thats where I would spend some time being aware of. Haha. Yeah obviously it stumps me aswell. But it doesn't scare me, how can I be scared of something that I don't know? Did he tell you that he is scared of it, or that his conceptual mind suppresses his emotions? I think it's a myth that most "intellectual" people suppress their emotions, they may appear that way, but actually it's just that they can analyze themselves more clearly, therefore carry less false beliefs and thus don't have to suffer from emotions that are the product of false beliefs. I'm ok with going with the flow. Intuition I have read a lot about and tried to cultivate it, but not much success so I gave it up. Whenever possible I plan ahead and try to leave nothing to chance. I see no reason to leave things to chance or employ intuition when it's not necessary and solid planning does an efficient job with minimal risk. As far as I know at least two feelings make me be interested in nonduality and post here. One is "I want to go home". The other is the astonishing fact that Being is instead of nothing. Questions don't bother me at all. In your second reply you presented an interpretation which I've heard and thought about a lot. I don't agree with it. For me honesty is absolutely imperative. If I find that you're right, I'll have zero problem in accepting that. Oh and I forgot one last thing. Everything I've written is strictly from my own experience, in the end it's the only measuring stick that I care for.
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Post by question on Jul 10, 2010 19:39:39 GMT -5
Question: "I'm the first to admit that much more thoughts appear than is sufficient. But in my experience there is pretty much zero indication that thought is able to alter reality in any way." Really, i think this is a great place to start. I say your experience is made up entirely of what you think and feel ABOUT the "reality" that is around you, and nothing of what is actually here. Even if you think I'm 80% wrong about that, maybe it's worth exploring the other 20%? "I don't know what this screen of mind is supposed to be. For me thoughts and ideas don't turn into images. Some people claim that they can visualize whatever they want, actually make images appear in their mind. I can't do that." When I say 'pink elephant', is there an image in your mind or not? 1) My experience is made up entirely of what I think and feel about reality? Sorry but it's a crazy statement. I'd say you're 99.999999999999% wrong. Now is it worth it exploring the chance that you're right? 2) No shape or colour, no image. I'd call it a form of thought. But whatever it is, there's no way that it could significantly mess with reality, let alone to the degree you speak of. If in real life I would see a pink elephant how could I possibly confuse it with a thought of a pink elephant? The thought "pink elephant" wouldn't make me unsee the actual pink elephant.
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Post by loverofall on Jul 10, 2010 20:20:39 GMT -5
Question: I guess Question wouldn't mind questions.
Why do you want to go home?
Does anything frustrate or scare you?
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Post by enigma on Jul 10, 2010 21:42:36 GMT -5
Question: "I'm the first to admit that much more thoughts appear than is sufficient. But in my experience there is pretty much zero indication that thought is able to alter reality in any way." Really, i think this is a great place to start. I say your experience is made up entirely of what you think and feel ABOUT the "reality" that is around you, and nothing of what is actually here. Even if you think I'm 80% wrong about that, maybe it's worth exploring the other 20%? "I don't know what this screen of mind is supposed to be. For me thoughts and ideas don't turn into images. Some people claim that they can visualize whatever they want, actually make images appear in their mind. I can't do that." When I say 'pink elephant', is there an image in your mind or not? 1) My experience is made up entirely of what I think and feel about reality? Sorry but it's a crazy statement. I'd say you're 99.999999999999% wrong. Now is it worth it exploring the chance that you're right? In that case, I would think rearranging your sock drawer would be more productive. Hehe. No suggestion was made that the image of a pink elephant you don't see in your head right now could be confused with a 'real' pink elephant. The question was asked in response to your comment that you can't visualize, which fascinates me, to be frank. (I'm not actually Frank, Though) The mental image won't make you unsee the actual thing, but it will prevent you from actually fully seeing it in the first place. I don't know if there's any openness to this idea. My guess is, not so much, but if you can get just a little distance from your experience such that you are able to observe the process of observing, you might notice that you look or listen just long enough to identify what it is you're seeing/hearing, and then you automatically switch to the mental image you have of what you've identified, at which point what you are supposedly observing is not really being seen at all. I'm not picking on you, this is just how 99.9999999999% of humanity functions. If, over the course of your lifetime, robins somehow evolved little horns on the tops of their heads, how many people would even notice? My guess is the children will, and very few adults. This isn't theoretical or non-dual, it's something you can notice in your actual experience. (Not the horns. That was just a hypothetical)
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Post by desertrain on Jul 11, 2010 1:12:30 GMT -5
question: May I suggest that you read 'The Book of Not Knowing' by Peter Ralston. I just got it a couple of days ago and it may be one of the best practical spiritual books out there. It's a very thorough work (almost 600 pages!) and goes very deeply into the matters of thought-mediated perception, the conditioned self, and being. There's very little metaphysical mumbo-jumbo and many exercises designed to get one closer to a direct experience of reality and being. I also enjoyed the writing style very much. This book might speak to you more than the writings of Ramana, Nisargadatta and the rest (which are quite boring in the end, to be honest).
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Post by enigma on Jul 11, 2010 2:29:42 GMT -5
It's ironic. We become frustrated with simplicity and enamored of complexity and yet simple is what it is. 'Non-dual jargon' is of no interest and why? Because it doesn't help mind to understand. Mind can never understand. It already understands far too much. This is the problem not the solution.
Mind does not need to be guided toward Truth. It needs to be chipped away like a granite block until nothing at all can be grasped. Tell mind that it's job is to unlearn and it will go look for a better teacher. 600 pages may require a lot of unlearning.
Mind is meandering horizontally along the conceptual buffet table when what it needs to do is dive vertically into the ocean of unknowing, ridding itself of illusions until all that remains is the stark simplicity of being.
Do you exist or not? Can you be something you observe or not? Are you aware that you are aware or not? Does something need to be known that isn't already obvious? Simple stuff. Child's play.
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Post by desertrain on Jul 11, 2010 3:17:34 GMT -5
Thank you Enigma, point well taken. I just thought the approach of this particular book might be helpful to Question, given what he has written here. The book is large because it covers a lot of ground. But the core message of it is in fact summarized in your post. If someone can grasp that without first reading 600 pages, that's great. The book was helpful to me, but I know in the end it all has to be put down. I'm not there yet myself, because I still read books about this stuff, but I might be getting there, little by little.
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Post by question on Jul 11, 2010 5:07:07 GMT -5
Question: I guess Question wouldn't mind questions. Why do you want to go home? Does anything frustrate or scare you? Good question. To me home is safe, more importantly it's where I belong and where I know who I am. Right now I don't know, I don't where I come from, what I'm doing here, what I am. question: May I suggest that you read 'The Book of Not Knowing' by Peter Ralston. I just got it a couple of days ago and it may be one of the best practical spiritual books out there. It's a very thorough work (almost 600 pages!) and goes very deeply into the matters of thought-mediated perception, the conditioned self, and being. There's very little metaphysical mumbo-jumbo and many exercises designed to get one closer to a direct experience of reality and being. I also enjoyed the writing style very much. This book might speak to you more than the writings of Ramana, Nisargadatta and the rest (which are quite boring in the end, to be honest). I've found the book on googlebooks, going to give it some time today. Thanks
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Post by question on Jul 11, 2010 5:10:16 GMT -5
No suggestion was made that the image of a pink elephant you don't see in your head right now could be confused with a 'real' pink elephant. The question was asked in response to your comment that you can't visualize, which fascinates me, to be frank. (I'm not actually Frank, Though) The mental image won't make you unsee the actual thing, but it will prevent you from actually fully seeing it in the first place. I don't know if there's any openness to this idea. My guess is, not so much, but if you can get just a little distance from your experience such that you are able to observe the process of observing, you might notice that you look or listen just long enough to identify what it is you're seeing/hearing, and then you automatically switch to the mental image you have of what you've identified, at which point what you are supposedly observing is not really being seen at all. I'm not picking on you, this is just how 99.9999999999% of humanity functions. If, over the course of your lifetime, robins somehow evolved little horns on the tops of their heads, how many people would even notice? My guess is the children will, and very few adults. This isn't theoretical or non-dual, it's something you can notice in your actual experience. (Not the horns. That was just a hypothetical) "Observing the observer" is something that I've been doing for at least 10 years. I can confirm that a process of identifying perceptions as x or y sometimes! takes place, but it's not constantly the case. Again, no mental image is formed from the mere identifying, the identifying doesn't interfere with what is seen or heard. If we both look at a chair from the exact same point in a room, do you then see something entirely different from what I see? Maybe you'll say that you see something unimaginable, well what I see is also unimaginable. I can't "imagine" a chair, no matter how hard I try, I can only think of a chair, but this thought is nothing like a chair seen, touched or sat on.
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Post by robert on Jul 11, 2010 8:59:23 GMT -5
this thread illustrates clearly a problem that exists in the wholesale release of teachings that take years to grasp. there are a many young minds that have grown used to ingesting huge amounts of information in a short period of time and easily grasping it and here this just isn't that type of information. these answers cannot be known in the same way that a math problem is known, yet we are stuck with the language of ordinary life to describe a non-ordinary non state because this isn't even a state of mind, a concept, or even an idea. which in a world such as this based on information and ideas pretty much makes it beyond useless. you are going to have to pick a teaching, the simplest teaching, and apply it or waste a good 10 years of your life stumbling around trying to see that this isn't for you. it's not a sin to live life that's why you are here if the path is for you put a little of the ego aside and listen and practice. the I AM will never be of any use to you if while you are trying to keep it in mind you are saying to yourself, "I AM and what a bunch of bs this is never going to work..........." and using it three times and going on to the next teaching. you have people here who have been practicing this stuff for decades and are just now starting to feel the wind on their faces, and that's what THIS is, it starts as a feeling, having said that describe a gentle breeze on your cheek to yourself using no words. exactly. good luck. r.
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Post by loverofall on Jul 11, 2010 11:25:01 GMT -5
Thats a good point how the younger generation is different.
The I AM is very effective for me now. Its no about saying I AM. Its about feeling I AM and using it as a lead into non conceptual awareness. I AM and look all around letting go of thoughts. You might even think I AM this as you look at each object without thinking the word of the object. I AM and look at the whole field of vision without separating. Try holding the breath as looking around very detailed to help train yourself to not be interested in your images or thoughts.
Jed says it great, its going to be uncomfortable if its effective because you are undoing all your conditioned patterns of identity.
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Post by enigma on Jul 11, 2010 11:37:29 GMT -5
Thank you Enigma, point well taken. I just thought the approach of this particular book might be helpful to Question, given what he has written here. The book is large because it covers a lot of ground. But the core message of it is in fact summarized in your post. If someone can grasp that without first reading 600 pages, that's great. The book was helpful to me, but I know in the end it all has to be put down. I'm not there yet myself, because I still read books about this stuff, but I might be getting there, little by little. Yup, what's needed is what happens. I just like to get a good rant going.
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Post by enigma on Jul 11, 2010 11:51:16 GMT -5
If we both look at a chair from the exact same point in a room, do you then see something entirely different from what I see? Maybe you'll say that you see something unimaginable, well what I see is also unimaginable. I can't "imagine" a chair, no matter how hard I try, I can only think of a chair, but this thought is nothing like a chair seen, touched or sat on. The style of the chair may not appeal to you. You may prefer contemporary over early American. When you sit in it, you may find it too hard, or soft, or just right. You may not like leather because you associate it with the smell, and you've developed an aversion to it from past experience. Can you prevent all these mental associations from arising and coloring your experience of the chair? Do you even know it's happening? Multiply those internal, mental, perceptual distortions by 132,546 and you start to get an idea what a typical day of experience really consists of, and it's not the experience of what is actually present. Almost everyone lives almost entirely in their thoughts and feelings ABOUT what is present, which is never present. This is how we create our own worlds, and it's complete fantasy.
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Post by enigma on Jul 11, 2010 12:08:01 GMT -5
this thread illustrates clearly a problem that exists in the wholesale release of teachings that take years to grasp. there are a many young minds that have grown used to ingesting huge amounts of information in a short period of time and easily grasping it and here this just isn't that type of information. these answers cannot be known in the same way that a math problem is known, yet we are stuck with the language of ordinary life to describe a non-ordinary non state because this isn't even a state of mind, a concept, or even an idea. which in a world such as this based on information and ideas pretty much makes it beyond useless. you are going to have to pick a teaching, the simplest teaching, and apply it or waste a good 10 years of your life stumbling around trying to see that this isn't for you. it's not a sin to live life that's why you are here if the path is for you put a little of the ego aside and listen and practice. the I AM will never be of any use to you if while you are trying to keep it in mind you are saying to yourself, "I AM and what a bunch of bs this is never going to work..........." and using it three times and going on to the next teaching. you have people here who have been practicing this stuff for decades and are just now starting to feel the wind on their faces, and that's what THIS is, it starts as a feeling, having said that describe a gentle breeze on your cheek to yourself using no words. exactly. good luck. r. And in spite of the truth of all that, it was very well said.
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