Quote:
Originally Posted by cylon  Forgot to ask, if you have tried IM out for yourself. Also, how does your "reality" seem/feel to you after coming out of meditation. |
Yeah, I keep intending to stop smoking!
I guess I haven't given it serious testing. I want to answer your last post at the same time, and it's to say again that I change my mind about all of this, and that rather rationalist posting just represents what was going on for me then. When things change for me to a more mystical outlook, it often includes the kind of things you've put so well in your last post (like the flock of birds idea, and the undeniable truth that our upbringing could make us tend to resist all other views of reality). I envy the relaxed style - if I'm wrong and it makes me happy... - I have been and still am obsessed with not being just wrong and happy, with working out the truth (or more of the truth over time). It's a disease!
I'm just starting to read Ken Wilber's book on Integral Psychology, and he presents the maps of various religions for consciousness, going up into the psychic and soul and Spirit realms, and he is so learned and confident, and I think so much of what little I've read of his work already that I start getting convinced that the mystical view is the right one. I was just resisting the glimpses I might get through the doors of perception, explaining them away. I said earlier that if we were psychic, scientific demonstrations of it would be commonplace and it would no longer be supernatural, just "not yet explained by science", but Wilber describes the higher realms of consciousness as largely
potential. So fewer people would be able to gain access to the higher states, and demonstrations would be uncommon. At one time in human evolution, perhaps the normal consciousness was to go around grunting about us, world, food, alive, dead, sun, river, etc. with no subjective consiousness, no abstraction, while a few souls were screaming "Hey, you guys, look, we're Selves, Individuals - Look, this is ME and that's YOU and there's an INSIDE and an OUTSIDE and, hang on a minute, let me get a piece of coloured stone...No, don't
eat the stone!...."
I guess what I find strange here, and is rather alien to my nature, is the intention bit of it. I never really equated spiritual growth with getting more proactive. When I meditate, I sometimes find great moments of unimaginable peace. I have been through a long period of frustration with it - it's not working! - but now I can expect to settle into
samadhi without too much trouble. I like the Zen approach of Katsuki Sekida, which emphasises samadhi itself as the purpose, the practice of being (and therefore being real), as opposed to being active, doing. Samadhi, in this view, is our true nature. The point is not to practise meditation in order to be better at anything else, or to discover deep secrets: it is that the deep secret is that all there is is right there in profound silence. The problem is, I don't know if that's right, or just having a nice relaxing time. I then read someone like Dr Paul Brunton (The Hidden Teaching Beyond Yoga), and he stresses that the monks who sit and meditate all their lives have missed the point. The meditation is only to give the mind the penetrating qualities required to understand
rationally the truths of the perennial philosophy, and to come back into the world and engage from that place of peace and freedom. And then I can read someone from the mainstream, and think maybe the whole sherbang is "Garbage, all of it". I've done this for over 30 years. It's no wonder I'm completely insane.
I'm sorry if I come over as preaching non-action at a board so dedicated to getting stuff done, and maybe that's my challenge, not to sit cross-legged for the rest of my life (which is tempting!) but make more decisions, plan things more and act more deliberately. I'll have a look at some of the pd techniques on the main bit of this site. But I still think it's insane to go the other way too much and end up reading while you shave to "save time". There was a TV programme on in Britain recently (I think someone mentioned it here) about raw foodies, and I just felt sorry for them. Any improvements we make in our lives can become an addiction, and create more of a problem than they solve. One woman drank a big glass of her urine every morning, so that her taste-buds could analyse the balance of her nutrients and let her know what she needed to adjust in her diet that day. Now, who's more insane, her or me? - I'm off to smoke. But I won't spend the rest of the day counting my steps, measuring this and weighing that, hunting high and low for organic, macrobiotic elixirs sold by charlatans for fortunes, and imagining that I can feel the difference.
Jesus I don't half go on!