Nikolai1

When Moorjani says not to look out side for the answers I think the first thing is to understand that she is not talking about feelings, thoughts or anything else that we imagine to be literally on the inside. The inside is a kind of metaphor for 'that which is always there'. The term inside is a good metaphor because wherever we travel, the things that are on the inside, like our vital organs, travel with us. But like I said, the inside is not actually and literally to be found on the inside. If you understand what I am referring to, then you already know how to stay centred. To stay centred is simply to focus on that which is always the case, no matter what. When you find this, and the sense of it has grown strong within you, you no longer need to look on the outside for solutions. The so called inside provides you with all the love and happiness you need. Once you find this, and you are stable in it, you are literally free to adopt the right course of action. You have the necessary perspective to actually see what is wholesome and healthy. All authentic spiritual practice is geared towards finding that inner self that isn't one inside or the outside. The most important breakthroughwe can make is to experience directly and concretely that we aren't not the body and not the mind. Oneness is the ending of your own individuality and of course that of others. I hope this is of some help to you.

Am starting to think that my dark night is also what the Buddhists call 'stuck in emptiness'. The reason I simply see sameness in all alternatives is because I am stuck in the Absolute perspective. Nagarjuna describes this trap as 'incurable', lets hope there is a bit more optimistic translation than that. So maybe being stuck in emptiness is the oriental equivalent of the Dark Night. An inevitable phase but one you can pass through.

Quantum theory does not lead to technological advance. To say so is like saying big bang theory creates the big bang. Technology appears in the world in the same way as anything appears in reality. Human beings are not the architects of technology, as they are themselves just another part of the technology. The apparent congruence between technologiecal know how and scientific theory is only apparent. It would be perfectly possible to describe modern technological events with, for example, the language of theology. Energy would become holy spiriit; gravity would become love, infinity would be God, the quanta would be the Word and so on. This could happen, but we could not conclude from it that reality was divine just because our theory says so. Likewise, we cannot infer anything about reality itself. Science and technology are separate and,incommensurable. There will come a time when modern scientific terms start to become sacrosanct. They will be protected by a kind of dogma police, like the words of he Bible once were. As words become sacrosanct they become unable to flexibly adapt to the changing technological picture. It will become necessary to adopt a new discourse that the dogma police have no interest in, and over more time this new language will become the language of reality. In the present, there are very many intelligent, pioneering individuals who are starting to practically understand non-materialistic technologies: siddhis, headings, and a ll sorts of non-local knowings. Modern materialist science is intrinsically incapable of explaining any technology that assumes the non-duality of actor and action. The observer effect in quantum theory presents an ambiguity that allows the new paradigm to gain a foothold. But this will be clamped down upon. Humanity has never tolerated ambiguity in the fundamentals of its worldview for long. After the clamp down the new paradigm will rise in the usual fashion...as a passionate thrust towards 'truth', and all the martyrdoms will pave the way to secure a new truth that also, alas, is purely discursive.

Well as a relative newcomer, you positively ooze mellow fruitfulness.

In three years I've never seen you pissed off. Maybe it doesn't actually happen anymore and you haven't realised.

The subject object split.

Really amused that both GMP and MH have been warned about their behaviour. Ha! Clearly they weren't always wise and tranquil gentlemen.

While it would be a fine thing for more people to read Feyerabend, spiritual realisation is essentially the realisation that there is no such thing as symbolic thought. A thought is its own reality, and the only reality. The thought does not stand as some kind of referent to anything outside of itself. There is nothing outside of the thought. Now clearly holding to this vision is certainly hard, and the attempt is spiritual practice itself. Or to put it another way, practice is living with the intense passion that makes this moment the only moment there is. There is nothing outside of this moment. The thought symbolises nothing. The symbol and the symbolised are one and the same thing. To engage in quantum physics is to engage in illusion, from the spiritual perspective. However much certain quantum theories might resemble certain spiritual teachings, for example on impermanence, or mind only, they are still illusory. In fact all spiritual teachings are themselves illusory, fingers pointing to the moon. The same goes for the scientific theories that resemble them. Too much time and respect is given to quantum theory. Seekers who are intelligent enough to disregard Hegelism, or Marxism, or Freudism go weak at the knees at quantum theory. Maybe its mysterious arcanity confuses them. But spiritually speaking the theory is useless, harmful and confusing. There is no possible bridge to realisation unless we see this. We have to radically transcend the objective reality that physics purports to explain. We need to see that our explanations themselves are gone in a moment. When we do this, we have tasted directly all the truth that quantum physics might provide us, and at the same time, avoided the pitfall that comes when we think that the theory has any validity.

Your blog on Jonathan Livingston seagull is awesome

Well put it this way - actually you don't have to be a long term meditator for that to happen. When you are in love with a person your eyes naturally shine. The beloved will experience your love in the form of beauty, the beauty of your eyes. So it's not so much a transaction of energy but a simple reflection of each other, or, to put it another way,you are both reflections of Love which contains you both.

The Hadron Collider is the modern symbol of monumental human silliness. Future generations will pity our naïveté. The wise among them will recognise that all societies develop myths for the sake of the weak minded. They will pretty sure where their own silliness lies. To be wise is to transcend history and modernity. Wisdom is to see the antiquity in all innovation, the regress of all progress. The wisest Druids tolerated Stonehenge as a superstitious device for the masses. This is what I think.

When I talked about muscular tension I was talking about the pressure that muscles exert on the actual eyeballs to focus on thins near or far. To the realised person, near and far no longer exist in the same way, and so their eyes are not being manipulated by muscles that are in turn being manipulated by spurious intellectual notions. But about the shininess it gets more complicated... The mild yet shiny eyed gaze corresponds to the 'form is emptiness' insight which is what leads to the dissolving of the dense, ,light absorbing fovea behind the pupil. But anyone who understands that 'form is emptiness' is liable, within a few days, to realise that actually 'form is not anything other than form'. This leads to the ability to selectively focus on form with a penetrating power that quite transcends the everyday naive understanding that 'form is form'. The meditator in this state of mind focuses not with the fovea (this has largely dissolved) but with the whole eyeball. You never see this in a photograph, only real life experience reveals this, but the meditators gaze can switch from being very mild and shiny to being almost unbearably piercing. The piercing expression is that where reflectivity has vanished, you see nothing of yourself, in such a gaze, and you feel yourself completely transparent, almost non existent.

I don't think all this talk about lack - of sunlight, nutrition etc - really applies to the dark night. Here is my perfect storm for the dark night to develop, and you'll see that the first is about what you've gained. 1) Insight, spiritual practices whatever have led to a massive increase is fundamental inner peace and equanimity. I often say to my wife that its like a can just get into a warm bath with a cold beer anytime I like. It's either always there or very close. Even at times of great upheaval it can be felt. This gain however wreaks havoc on your normal everyday will. Like freeform says, every situation is one of presence. Emotionally you recognise only sameness in all alternatives. And when the emotional component of the will is stumped like this, decision making is made very difficult. But your intellect sees very clearly the sheer arbitrariness of everything you do. This combination of emotional sameness and intellectual arbitrariness is very characteristic of the dark night. 2) Because you life up to this point has basically been focused on inner peace, it means that you have probably neglected to develop a well structured outer life. In my case, I paid virtually no attention to building a stable career or profession in my early twenties. Your outer life is therefore not on autopilot like many peoples - just ticking over, performing adequately but effectively, the cash coming in each month predictably. You are therefore constantly forced into developing strategies for survival, but without any clear emotional or intellectual rationale for doing so. This agonising state is the dark night all over. 3) If youre like me, You probably weren't born with the desire to sit full lotus each evening. My interest in spiritual cultivation was borne out of a vague dissatisfaction with everyday life that started when I was about 16. But it wasnt a strong thing, and my family and all my friends were basically just regular people with regular aims, and I was enough like them to share in those aims. Needless to say, there has been a slow drifting away from these people as I focused more and more on my inner path. Now, and this is also part of the dark night, I am left without any ability to connect with others I know in actual life. have never met another person in real life whom I can have the conversations I have on this forum. Sad, but true. So this another ingredient of the dark night: where you have allowed the spiritual process to completely dissolve your social identity, and have not yet gained any type of identity to take its place. And without a social identity, you lack a social network. And without a network, you lack the opportunities to remedy the survival issues mentioned in point 2. This, again, is agony...but the peace is always there...the warm bath and the beer are at hand. My dark night has now come. And I can honestly say that looking back the warning signs were there when I was a 9 year old kid who frequently thought that grown-ups were ridiculous creatures who didn't know what they were doing. That fundamental insight has been simultaneously developing me and undermining me my whole life, and now I have reached an impasse. Some kind of second puberty is required, some kind of shift to a way of living that continues to bring me peace, but which is in itself immune to my own criticism and dissatisfaction. It has to be spontaneous and pure and self- authenticating. Like freeform said, it is Wu-Wei. So when I ask people how their dark nights ended, I guess I am asking how they have learned to live wu wei?

Hi all, In another post freeform said something about the Dark Night of the Soul that got me thinking: I'm sure lots of us can connect with this feeling, like you can no longer see the meaning or pleasure in something like a new car. You once did, you remember how it feels, but its beyond you now and therefore the colleague seems to you someone alien who you can no longer connect with. But then it occurred to me: I have three young children so as you can imagine Christmas is a pretty exciting time. But for some reason, I don't feel alienated from my children just because they are besides themselves with excitement over their new Lego set. What happens is that I simply remember being a child myself, and experience the pleasure vicariously. I let their pleasure become my own pleasure, even though I couldn't care less about any new Lego set for myself. So why don't I do the same with my colleague and his new car? Why do I let myself feel alienated from him, and from a whole lot of other people who are living life looking for the same pleasures? Is the solution to alienation, simply accepting that you have outgrown what other people have not yet outgrown. And when we truly accept this, might we start to take pleasure in their naive ways as we do children? I'm sure lots of you feel very uncomfortable at this, because I know I do. There is something very anxiety provoking about placing ourselves senior to pretty much the whole of humanity. It smacks of spiritual pride doesn't it? Adopting the rather patronising position: "I remember when I too used to enjoy such trifles. Your innocence fills my heart with joy!" So I think alienation is borne of fear of being who you actually already are. It is the fear of separating yourself from your former peers, of going alone. It is the lack of confidence in yourself, and therefore alienation is paradoxically, the excessive attachment to who you once were and all the people who were like you. The alienation is not from others, as you imagine, it is alienation from your self.

By all means move on from Kant, but only if you've understood him first. Hegel ,Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Jaspers and kierkegaard were the five steps I took next. But most physicists have yet to reach Kant.

Hagar - so how would you know that karma is speeding up? What happens?

The increased shine is due to changes at the retina. But I'll start at the beginning... As newborn babies we are not born with the intellectual tendency to focus on individual objects. This comes with time, and as our intellectual focus develops there is a corresponding change at the retina. Because we consciously fixate on things, the light detecting cells migrate to form a dense cluster point on the retina directly behind the pupil that is called the fovea. Google this word, fovea. An experienced meditator through their practice has seen that the everyday world: time, space and plurality are an illusion. They are therefore less intellectually fixated on individual 'things' in time and space but rather see these things as another's angle fleeing manifestation of a higher reality. This higher reality is their primary focus. This means that the fovea is no longer needed, and the density of the retina behind the pupil disperses. This is the reason why the meditators eyes are more twinkly. Basically, their retinas have become more reflective of incoming light because there are less absorbent cells directly behind the pupil. Intellectual fixation on discrete objects also exerts muscular pressures on the eyeball. Meditation reduces this pressure and often changes eye shape as well as reflectivity. Hope this helps!

The basic epistemological assumption of the human being is the subject and object split, yet mystical experience reveals this to be an illusion. In search of purity, the lesser philosophers, while tacitly endorsing this split, try to reduce everything down to of the two assumptions. Thus we have the two corresponding world views: 1 Realism, materialism, empiricism - reality is independent from us. 2 Idealism, constructivism, rationalism - we create reality from our own consciousness. Quantum mechanics is a corpus of intellectual theory that in some places assumes worldview 1 and at other times 2, but this in in the most part unconscious. Physicists imagine that they are exploring reality empirically and that he observer effect is 'out there' as a feature of reality. They do not understand that the moment they recognise the observer effect they have become idealists - by that I mean, that they are understanding nature as a rationalist through mathematics and fitting reality to preconceived concepts. The quantum and the classical will never be reconciled. It is logically impossible. The only reason they even attempt is because they are confused by the fact they all started with a physics degree and are operating within the same discipline. They are also confused because the physicist is typically a second rate thinker who hasn't the strength to absorb the insights of Immanuel Kant. The highest thinkers approach reality directly and experientially because they understand the distorting nature of theory. They avoid the pitfalls of both realism and idealism. They don't synthesise the classical and the quantum, they completely transcend it. There is a terrible modern habit of trying to use modern physics to validate the insights of the great spiritual teachers like the Buddha. As if Buddhism has now been empirically proven! It's a joke, really, but you hear it a lot, especially in new age circles. Physics is an intellectual trap, which traps the second raters. Move on from it, if you can.

Hi Seeker of Wisdom I opened up MCTB and I was immediately hooked! I used to be very into Buddhism but I despaired of ever meeting anyone who understood it as I did. For me, pretty much the whole power of the Buddha resides in his teaching on impermanence. To understand this properly is itself liberating, but nearly everyone talks limply about change and decay, and summer turning to autumn... ie the bloody obvious! Impermenance is one hell of a lot more radical than that. Impermanence is a truly shocking teaching, if understood. Anyway, I'm glad that this writer understands impermanence as I do, and prioritises the Three Marks of Existence, rather than all this unedifying stuff about four noble truths and the eightfold path etc. So, MCTB now emailed to Kindle to be read at leisure Just wanted to edit to add this quote from the book: YES!

Hi CT, In the Dark Night thread. Yasjua said this: I thought this was really interesting, that the growth came when he returned to everyday matters. But I wonder if this applies to me because I've always been very much in the 'thick of life' - Either working, or being at home with the babies. or a bit of both, and now three young children - up at 6 collapse by 10 in the evening. I know many people do have busier lives than me, but I'm not exactly sitting on a mountain top either. But that said: I can't say that loving kindness to all humanity is my way at all. Pursuit of wisdom has definitely been my preliminary platform. and yes you are right, it has led me to a place where I cannot at all conceive where to go next because all the usual paths through life in this world don't interest me, or more like, I have intellectually 'seen through' them all. Could you say more about this poverty of spirit? Thnaks

Hi Lth Got it, thanks! Thanks - I actually prefer that way of viewing it. In this thread, I looked at the problem from the other perspective. I am looking from my own soul, but seeing only their mind-based self, and then feeling angst about the separation between us. Angst about what I have become, and where I am headed. I think the sense of kinship with other humans has always been the antidote to angst, or, if you like, love for humanity is the substitute for divine love. I think that's why it is scary to set yourself apart, before God has stepped in to replace them. But don't think I had some general love for humanity before. I loved some people, and thought others were scumbags. Maybe with God's love I can love all humans without exception!

Hi freeform - you are totally speaking my language, thank you. Exactly and precisely. This is why I don't want this to be confused with depression. Each moment has richness. There are no highs and lows. Everything is equally rich - hence the stagnation. But I do not want to go back to the old ways of pleasure seeking, that would be backward step. Yes I'm sure. If you could explain it, it would be something everyday and conventional. I guess passion, true passion, has to strike from nowhere. And because its unexplainable its probably very hard to notice when it comes, because our ears only hear what they have always been conditioned to hear. I think this is my situation. I can't remember the last time I was impassioned enough to follow any particular path. Passion is what I'm waiting for! But maybe I need to listen out better; I need to realise that passion is a thing whispered in the moment and then missed, not some grand project me that is going to absorb me, like a 5 year plan. Yes this is how imagine wu wei as well. I think this spontaneous inspiration is the only way for me to continue living because I won't ever return to deliberate aims and objectives that 'make sense'. Unless I do die, of course.

This latest dark phase was brought on recently by a week in French ski resort. I used to absolutely love skiing, and it was an important part of my life, and all my friends. But this time skiing gave me no more pleasure than walking or even sitting on the sofa. All was the same to me. So I found myself looking around me thinking. "Why are you doing this? Why haven't you outgrown it like I have? Why have you all travelled halfway across Europe at extreme cost for this?" So this is definitely something I have to work on. Why do I even care what others do for fun? Why can't I come to terms with other people and the way they are?

Yes, and that's the problem. Because they haven't decided to do it themselves, they don't recognise the seniority that you see in yourself. So, this inner seniority has to be lived alongside the outer juniority that comes when your car is inevitable old, and your phone outmoded. because you see no point in owning the expensive best. We are forced to have the graciousness to love others as our children, while they see nothing in us beyond our old clothes and humble job. This balancing act is a hard test! At least when we are simply alienated we can agree with all around us that we are nobodies. There's none of this terrible dissonance! The only possible analogue to this in the worldly world is when circumstances place us into seniority. Before we were just one of the guys on the shop floor, but then the team manager post got offered to me not them, and things will never be the same again. I can never go back to who I was. I'll never be just one of the gang again. Also, I remember reading about Tony Blair's angst when he realised that HE was Prime Minister and no-one else, and the no-one else has to send troops to war, only him. Sure, there is angst in this, but when your seniority is recognised by everyone around it is easier to adopt the role. Before long you believe in it yourself. The seniority that comes with spiritual growth is known to no-one but yourself, and that makes it harder to realise. The saints all say that eventually God steps in to take over, and then your maturity comes easily. This I suppose is Wu Wei.

Thanks freeform - really great post. Do you feel like your bright days are winning out over the dark nights?