waddicalwabbit
Full Member
Let's all go down the wabbit hole
Posts: 125
|
Post by waddicalwabbit on Jul 13, 2010 9:28:14 GMT -5
I think ur right, ZD. Us spiritual newbies DON'T experience 'things' like chairs as you do, because we're still (mostly) experiencing life in duality. I, for one, appreciate hearing what you see, because it gives me the idea of that sort of experiencing. I'm much better at doing this with things that are alive, particularly trees and plants, than with inanimate objects. The chair looks like my concept of chair still. I can understand how you see it and if I try, I can see it the same way, but it don't come natural, if u get my drift.
I'm leaving bits of carrot behind on the trail so I can find my way out of this thread if I get lost. Please don't mess with my carrot bits!
|
|
|
Post by mansuit on Jul 13, 2010 10:21:02 GMT -5
Enigma wrote, "I would say you have described what the mind conceptualizes as a chair, and I say this is not the chair. At the risk of being seriously misunderstood, and not to be too overly malarkyish, I say the chair is vibrantly alive, intimately personal, and completely empty." Yuppers, that's about as far as one can go in language. When I look at a chair, or any thing else, for that matter, I see ___________, the blank space pointing to the living truth that is beyond conception. I don't know if it is possible to fully grok this until one passes through the "gateless gate" and experiences what the word "oneness" signifies. Zen, when you say this..that you see ______ when you look at any "thing" is this because you recognize that any "thing" is made of ________, or because you have realized that "Zen" is made of _________? I guess that is what I was getting at...if I first realize that my perception of the world is completely made of concepts, because "I" am merely a bundle of concepts, could this be a First Step? Of course, it must be realized and just not intellectually understood, otherwise the understanding itself is just a concept. Thats where I get twisted. How to grok this as a Truth...
|
|
waddicalwabbit
Full Member
Let's all go down the wabbit hole
Posts: 125
|
Post by waddicalwabbit on Jul 13, 2010 10:36:10 GMT -5
Eeesh! Ok! Uncle. The wabbit has left the trail, and made a beeline thru the trees back to the warren. I'm safely out. Think I'll go just be and watch the sun travel across the sky and smell the hay and the sea.
|
|
|
Post by zendancer on Jul 13, 2010 10:57:26 GMT -5
Eeesh! Ok! Uncle. The wabbit has left the trail, and made a beeline thru the trees back to the warren. I'm safely out. Think I'll go just be and watch the sun travel across the sky and smell the hay and the sea. Waddical: That is precisely where all of these words are pointing.
|
|
|
Post by zendancer on Jul 13, 2010 11:03:30 GMT -5
Enigma wrote, "I would say you have described what the mind conceptualizes as a chair, and I say this is not the chair. At the risk of being seriously misunderstood, and not to be too overly malarkyish, I say the chair is vibrantly alive, intimately personal, and completely empty." Yuppers, that's about as far as one can go in language. When I look at a chair, or any thing else, for that matter, I see ___________, the blank space pointing to the living truth that is beyond conception. I don't know if it is possible to fully grok this until one passes through the "gateless gate" and experiences what the word "oneness" signifies. Zen, when you say this..that you see ______ when you look at any "thing" is this because you recognize that any "thing" is made of ________, or because you have realized that "Zen" is made of _________? I guess that is what I was getting at...if I first realize that my perception of the world is completely made of concepts, because "I" am merely a bundle of concepts, could this be a First Step? Of course, it must be realized and just not intellectually understood, otherwise the understanding itself is just a concept. Thats where I get twisted. How to grok this as a Truth... No, _________has nothing to do with what __________is made of, and it certainly has nothing to do with Zen. Zen simply points to __________, as do all other non duality teachings. To grok this simply keep shifting your attention away from thoughts to what your eyes see. Leave all names and ideas behind. Keep the question "What am I looking at" hovering in the background non-verbally until the illusions of thingness and separateness are burned through. Later today I'll post that passage from Helen Courtois's book that illustrates what happens if you do what I'm suggesting.
|
|
waddicalwabbit
Full Member
Let's all go down the wabbit hole
Posts: 125
|
Post by waddicalwabbit on Jul 13, 2010 11:03:46 GMT -5
Eeesh! Ok! Uncle. The wabbit has left the trail, and made a beeline thru the trees back to the warren. I'm safely out. Think I'll go just be and watch the sun travel across the sky and smell the hay and the sea. Waddical: That is precisely where all of these words are pointing. Good deal, ZD. That I can handle! Thank you. Or maybe I should say, 'Think I'll go watch the ________ travel across the _________ and smell the ___________ and the __________.' Maybe i can do that without my concepts of these things. One breath at a time, then the next, then the next....
|
|
|
Post by charliegee on Jul 13, 2010 11:03:53 GMT -5
took that many words to say, 'look' ...
|
|
|
Post by zendancer on Jul 13, 2010 11:18:12 GMT -5
Amen! If pointing one time to ___________were sufficient, it would stop the printing presses in this genre and save a lot of trees. LOL
|
|
waddicalwabbit
Full Member
Let's all go down the wabbit hole
Posts: 125
|
Post by waddicalwabbit on Jul 13, 2010 13:16:14 GMT -5
Oh great! now we're going to start with 'when is a tree NOT a tree' and then we can argue about whether or not we're saving trees if it's all digital text and then what exactly the internet is and if there is one and the nature of electrical current and freaking waves and sh*t.
|
|
|
Post by charliegee on Jul 13, 2010 13:25:24 GMT -5
maybe we can market a non-dual version of Mad Libs ... with all these _________ I'm ________ it'll be a big ___________ ...
|
|
|
Post by peanut on Jul 13, 2010 15:41:40 GMT -5
This thread has been amazing. Right now i look at a chair and sit on it! Need a rest :-)
Seriously...Once ,by grace, looking at an orange tree it became alive,impersonal,empty and intimate. Walking in awe an entire morning passed this way. This glimpse of 'oneness' changed me forever and so i keep looking at chairs,trees, rocks, boats, dogs ........ and reading threads about chairs!
|
|
|
Post by charliegee on Jul 13, 2010 16:05:56 GMT -5
"I am," I said To no one there An no one heard at all Not even the chair "I am," I cried "I am," said I And I am lost, and I can't even say why
Neil Diamond
|
|
|
Post by zendancer on Jul 13, 2010 17:07:03 GMT -5
Okay, I thought it was a chair, but it turned out to be a desk. Here's the story:
Helen Courtois’s book, “An Experience of Enlightenment,” is now out of print, but there are some used copies on sale on Amazon for about $60. Her story is fascinating far beyond the story contained in the book, but I’ll start with the book. When she was a young child, she communed with nature and later remembered it as a magical time. During her teenage years she began searching for that world that she remembered. Here are some pertinent excerpts from the book describing events when she was about eighteen years old:
“…..I ceased to search for an answer in reading and became intensely interested in exploring everyday experience. The very nature of sensation itself absorbed my attention. I became increasingly aware of sights, sounds, touch, and smell impressions, feelings, all for their own sakes, and the more observant I became, the more endless the vistas which seemed to open. P. 25
“(I asked myself)…..How does one sense Reality whole, all at once? Is that impossible?” Like a strong undertow pulling me down and away from the routine surface of life, my inner quest absorbed more and more of my time. I began to stay alone in my room for long periods, just sitting, observing, struggling inwardly for some direct contact. ‘If there is a basic Reality that is common to everything,’ I thought, it must be within our experience too….’ ‘Surely I can grasp it immediately and at first hand. Any other way would be only second hand and would not be IT at all. But how could I get at it, how know it first hand?” p. 26
“It was as if I had been living in a world of ideas; now, having lost confidence in these and having to let go of them I had to start all over again, to look at everything, feel it, touch it, sense it again almost as an infant does, to realize what experience was truly like. Again and again I returned to considering the sense of sight. It seemed to me that HOW one saw the world around one, not WHAT one saw but HOW, was the crux of the problem.” P.27
“Now it was as if I were being pulled down into a vortex of a maelstrom within me, pulling me ever further down and away from everyday life and involving me in an all-consuming life or death struggle.” P. 29
“I finally decided that Reality must be unlike any preconceived idea I might have of it and reached a point of just waiting and letting be. For long periods I simply sat, saying inwardly, ’No, not this’ as if waiting, for what I knew not. Sometime in April, Easter vacation arrived and I went home to spend a week with my parents. There, about three days later, alone in my room, 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 changed on its axis and my search was over.” P.43
“The small, pale green 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 a 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 little bedroom yet totally changed. Still sitting in wonder on the edge of my narrow bed, one of the first things I realized was that 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.” P. 47
“What on earth had happened? So released from all tension, so ecstatically light did I feel, I seemed to float down the hall to the bathroom to look at my face in the mottled mirror over the sink. The pupils of my eyes were dark, dilated, and brimming with mirth. With a wondrous relief, I began to laugh as I’d never laughed before, from the soles of my feet upward. Within a few days I had returned to school, and there over a period of many months there took place a ripening, a deepening and unfolding of this experience which filled me with wonder and gratitude for every moment. The foundations had fallen from my world. I had plunged into a numinous openness 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. Often, without any particular direction in mind, I found myself outside running along the street in joyous abandon. Sometimes when alone I simply danced as freely as I did as a child. The whole world seemed to have reversed itself, to have turned outside in. Activity flowed simply and effortlessly, and to my amazement, seemingly without thought. Instead of my old sequence of learning, thinking, planning, then acting, action had taken precedence and whatever was learned was surprisingly incidental.” P.49
“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 changeless unity and harmony in charge of the universe and the inseparability of all opposites. 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…… 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 more or less importance to the whole. I now saw that wholeness and holiness are one.” P.51
Courtois lived in an enlightened state of mind for several years without knowing anything about enlightenment. On several occasions she tried to describe her experience to people, but no one knew what she was talking about. Eventually she gave up trying to communicate with other people about it and just lived her life moment to moment.
Unfortunately, after a few years of clarity, her old thinking habits slowly returned, and she began to feel special because of what had happened to her. Only when she met Zen Master Yasutani Roshi, twenty-five years later, did she begin to understand what had happened (though not completely). Yasutani encouraged her to begin meditating, and sometime afterwards she wrote her story and her book was published.
After I read her story, I got in touch with her, and we communicated for several years by phone and mail prior to her death. I don't think that she ever realized that her everyday life, no matter how mundane or thought-based, was as much one-with the wholeness as her experience of the free-flowing presence she described in her book. Like many people who have big whiz-bang experiences, I don't think that she was ever able to fully accept that our "right-this-moment-just-like-this-unenlightened-ordinariness" is also 100% one-with the whiz-bang stuff.
The lesson in her story is that the conscious sense of connectedness, if once attained, is dependent upon where one's attention lies. In the words of Leonard Jacobsen, "There is God's world and mind's world." If we stay too long in mind's world, we may not be able to find our way home.
|
|
|
Post by charliegee on Jul 13, 2010 17:27:36 GMT -5
wow, beautiful ...
|
|
|
Post by enigma on Jul 13, 2010 22:05:46 GMT -5
I would say the 'me' is a bundle of concepts in the same way and through the same process that perception of the world becomes a bundle of concepts, which is not to say that the world is made of concepts or that the world is in some way caused by the bundle of concepts called 'me'. It's not particularly nondual, which may be a good thingy right about now, but we could perhaps view the world as being formed on two levels. One is the 'actual' world that presents itself to all perceivers, and the other is made up of what we individually think and feel ABOUT that world. The latter is the one most folks live in. The former is the same world devoid of conceptualization. Among other things, this means the ideas of here/there, perceiver/perceived, inside/outside, are not a meaningful part of the perception of this world. These are conceptual structures derived from that perception. The image in your mind is also a derivative of that perception. As with Truth realization, nothing is added in this 'true perception' that is not already there. Much is omitted. Mind's image of the chair is not alive to mind in the same way that a picture of your lover is not alive in the way your lover is alive. You wouldn't lie next to your lover while staring at the picture, and yet it seems acceptable to sit in a chair while 'staring' at one's concept of a chair.
|
|