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Originally Posted by mercuryrising  Thanks for the compliment. I am floundering in the foothills myself. Teaching is the best way I learn.
You are not your thinking. And while I believe you when you say you've had some great meditation experiences, you're still up in your head (Not that you are the only one, by any means. You're just particularly good at it.). Here is an example:
You didn't try what he was saying. Instead, you thought about it. Enlightenment doesn't come in the thought of enlightenment or anything else for that matter, but through the transcendence of thought.
The paradox is that to expand your awareness, you have to put all your focus on one point. In truth, it can be any point. You can think of poop on a stick with complete one-pointedness and POW, it happens. |
Thanks, mercuryrising. I have practised a lot of different techniques including single-pointed awareness and I have experienced what I experienced, and I make of it what I make of it. There are those, like you, who say that the truth of such a philosophy cannot be comprehended by the rational mind, but there are also those who say that it is essential to take what happens in meditation and think about it rationally too.
I could tell you that when you think you experience oneness with the Universe (which presumably you do, or you would not propose it), you were enjoying the delights of an unusual state of consciousness and adding on to it an even more enjoyable interpretation.
The strange thing is that, in order to argue for Oneness, you are making rational judgements about what happened in your meditation - describing it and interpreting it afterwards - even though you are denying that rationality was involved. But when I use rational arguments to doubt Oneness, you say that I am stuck in my head while you have transcended reason and just know. I don't buy it. I used to. I went there and came back and told people how I've seen the light, the Oneness of everything. I even told the people who didn't believe me that it's a feeling thing, intuition, and they have to get out of their heads. It's a great trip. Man we luurve our trips. I was a special guy then, like some kind of guru.
You may be right, I don't know. I was going to say, ok I'll try again, give one-pointed awareness another go for - how long?, I don't know - daily for 3 months? - but there's this other problem I mentioned. If I sit there doing my meditation every day, I'm going to really want you to be right. I mean, we do don't we? I want you to be right, right now! We'd love it to be true that there's a place inside where I am WE are EVERYTHING is GOD, and so I'll be sitting there
wanting it, trying to
taste that intuition you might have tasted, and then I might just have a moment where I sense that what I just experienced could be a little bit like the real thing, and then I could remember that I have to let go of my thinking mind and my doubts and just go with it...
...but what if intuition is actually just belief caused by the desire to believe?
Desire causes us to believe all sorts of untruths...little by little we let go of our doubts and believe because we want it to be true so much. No doubt you pity me in my rational prison, not daring to feel my way into higher understandings because I have a fear of self-hypnotically programming myself to believe. It's ok. We're different. Not letting go of doubt, being a sceptic, has become my greatest tool on the quest for knowledge. I can suspend my thinking, but I'm not going to come out of it and stick my favourite cosmological fantasy onto it - I'm going to try out different ideas, different theories, doubt and test and judge.