Spiritual ADD

[innerspace_cadet]

I think I've got spiritual Attention Deficit Disorder. One week, I was into Buddhist mindfulness techniques. The next week, I was involved with mantras. Now I've picked up an interest in shamanism. A nagging worry at the back of my mind is that I am digging a bunch of shallow holes but never reaching water, as the saying goes. Have you had this experience? I think I bounce from one practice to another because I'm never sure which practice or meditation method is right for me. How do I know which method or practice to stick with?

Edited August 12, 2008 by innerspace_cadet

[Wun Yuen Gong]

Hi,

 

I know what you are saying you should maybe research into the main things that intrest you and see if there is ONE system that is complete with all the information you are after.

 

There is NO quick quick path to enlightenment just alot of hard work in sitting, standing, lying methods, some use Mantras, mudras some just are based on Emptiness or whatever it maybe.

 

I like Emptiness / Void which is based on my Daoist System which brings me alot of relaxtion, heat, stress relief, energy, healing etc.

 

good luck in your training let us all know what you choose to use as your cultivation system aways good to read others journeys!

 

WYG

[Ian]

How do I know which method or practice to stick with?

 

What has helped me has been to understand very clearly exactly what the goal of a practice is and how it is supposed to get there. The simpler the better, in my view.

 

Stage two is to be sure that that goal is what you want, which is trickier, for me. Rather depends what you think "you" is. Yoda's been saying some interesting things about intention, lately.

 

In the short term it can be very helpful to meet a teacher and just to have a strong sense of "I want to be like him/her, so I'll do what he/she does."

 

I think this is about the biggest problem we face, these days. If we would only do the same thing for five years the skills would be transferrable, whatever they are....

[Patrick Brown]

Perhaps you're just going through a process of finding out what's right for you? The only thing I will say is learning a tai chi form is worth while and if you drop it you can always come back to it years latter. I've been learning the 24 Forms (also called the Beijing Form) for a couple of years on and off. I've taught myself about a third of it from books and DVD although I'm aware that it will take me the rest of my life to really learn it!

 

I don't like this video of the 24 Forms as it just doesn't seem to be executed very gracefully but it'll give you an idea:

 

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My personal philosophy of tai chi is that it should be stillness in motion and be as graceful and as flowing as possible.

[xabir2005]

I think I've got spiritual Attention Deficit Disorder. One week, I was into Buddhist mindfulness techniques. The next week, I was involved with mantras. Now I've picked up an interest in shamanism. A nagging worry at the back of my mind is that I am digging a bunch of shallow holes but never reaching water, as the saying goes. Have you had this experience? I think I bounce from one practice to another because I'm never sure which practice or meditation method is right for me. How do I know which method or practice to stick with?

What are you looking for from these practices? If it is to discover your true nature (luminous/aware and empty) and be liberated, then Awareness is key.

 

Here's something to ponder on:

 

What Meditation Is

 

Meditation is a word, and words are used in different ways by different speakers. This may seem like a trivial point, but it is not. It is quite important to distinguish exactly what a particular speaker means by the words he uses. Every culture on earth, for example, has produced some sort of mental practice which might be termed meditation. It all depends on how loose a definition you give to that word. Everybody does it, from Africans to Eskimos. The techniques are enormously varied, and we will make no attempt to survey them. There are other books for that. For the purpose of this volume, we will restrict our discussion to those practices best known to Western audiences and most likely associated with the term meditation.

 

Within the Judeo-Christian tradition we find two overlapping practices called prayer and contemplation. Prayer is a direct address to some spiritual entity. Contemplation in a prolonged period of conscious thought about some specific topic, usually a religious ideal or scriptural passage. From the standpoint of mental culture, both of these activities are exercises in concentration. The normal deluge of conscious thought is restricted, and the mind is brought to one conscious area of operation. The results are those you find in any concentrative practice: deep calm, a physiological slowing of the metabolism and a sense of peace and well-being.

 

Out of the Hindu tradition comes Yogic meditation, which is also purely concentrative. The traditional basic exercises consist of focusing the mind on a single object a stone, a candle flame, a syllable or whatever, and not allowing it to wander. Having acquired the basic skill, the Yogi proceeds to expand his practice by taking on more complex objects of meditation chants, colorful religious images, energy channels in the body and so forth. Still, no matter how complex the object of meditation, the meditation itself remains purely an exercise in concentration.

 

Within the Buddhist tradition, concentration is also highly valued. But a new element is added and more highly stressed. That element is awareness. All Buddhist meditation aims at the development of awareness, using concentration as a tool. The Buddhist tradition is very wide, however, and there are several diverse routes to this goal. Zen meditation uses two separate tacks. The first is the direct plunge into awareness by sheer force of will. You sit down and you just sit, meaning that you toss out of your mind everything except pure awareness of sitting. This sounds very simple. It is not. A brief trial will demonstrate just how difficult it really is. The second Zen approach used in the Rinzai school is that of tricking the mind out of conscious thought and into pure awareness. This is done by giving the student an unsolvable riddle which he must solve anyway, and by placing him in a horrendous training situation. Since he cannot flee from the pain of the situation, he must flee into a pure experience of the moment. There is nowhere else to go. Zen is tough. It is effective for many people, but it is really tough.

 

Another stratagem, Tantric Buddhism, is nearly the reverse. Conscious thought, at least the way we usually do it, is the manifestation of ego, the you that you usually think that you are. Conscious thought is tightly connected with self-concept. The self-concept or ego is nothing more than a set of reactions and mental images which are artificially pasted to the flowing process of pure awareness. Tantra seeks to obtain pure awareness by destroying this ego image. This is accomplished by a process of visualization. The student is given a particular religious image to meditate upon, for example, one of the deities from the Tantric pantheon. He does this in so thorough a fashion that he becomes that entity. He takes off his own identity and puts on another. This takes a while, as you might imagine, but it works. During the process, he is able to watch the way that the ego is constructed and put in place. He comes to recognize the arbitrary nature of all egos, including his own, and he escapes from bondage to the ego. He is left in a state where he may have an ego if he so chooses, either his own or whichever other he might wish, or he can do without one. Result: pure awareness. Tantra is not exactly a game of patty cake either.

 

Vipassana is the oldest of Buddhist meditation practices. The method comes directly from the Sitipatthana Sutta, a discourse attributed to Buddha himself. Vipassana is a direct and gradual cultivation of mindfulness or awareness. It proceeds piece by piece over a period of years. The student's attention is carefully directed to an intense examination of certain aspects of his own existence. The meditator is trained to notice more and more of his own flowing life experience. Vipassana is a gentle technique. But it also is very , very thorough. It is an ancient and codified system of sensitivity training, a set of exercises dedicated to becoming more and more receptive to your own life experience. It is attentive listening, total seeing and careful testing. We learn to smell acutely, to touch fully and really pay attention to what we feel. We learn to listen to our own thoughts without being caught up in them.

 

The object of Vipassana practice is to learn to pay attention. We think we are doing this already, but that is an illusion. It comes from the fact that we are paying so little attention to the ongoing surge of our own life experiences that we might just as well be asleep. We are simply not paying enough attention to notice that we are not paying attention. It is another Catch-22.

 

Through the process of mindfulness, we slowly become aware of what we really are down below the ego image. We wake up to what life really is. It is not just a parade of ups and downs, lollipops and smacks on the wrist. That is an illusion. Life has a much deeper texture than that if we bother to look, and if we look in the right way.

 

Vipassana is a form of mental training that will teach you to experience the world in an entirely new way. You will learn for the first time what is truly happening to you, around you and within you. It is a process of self discovery, a participatory investigation in which you observe your own experiences while participating in them, and as they occur. The practice must be approached with this attitude.

 

"Never mind what I have been taught. Forget about theories and prejudgments and stereotypes. I want to understand the true nature of life. I want to know what this experience of being alive really is. I want to apprehend the true and deepest qualities of life, and I don't want to just accept somebody else's explanation. I want to see it for myself." If you pursue your meditation practice with this attitude, you will succeed. You'll find yourself observing things objectively, exactly as they are--flowing and changing from moment to moment. Life then takes on an unbelievable richness which cannot be described. It has to be experienced.

 

The Pali term for Insight meditation is Vipassana Bhavana. Bhavana comes from the root 'Bhu', which means to grow or to become. There fore Bhavana means to cultivate, and the word is always used in reference to the mind. Bhavana means mental cultivation. 'Vipassana' is derived from two roots. 'Passana' means seeing or perceiving. 'Vi' is a prefix with the complex set of connotations. The basic meaning is 'in a special way.' But there also is the connotation of both 'into' and 'through'. The whole meaning of the word is looking into something with clarity and precision, seeing each component as distinct and separate, and piercing all the way through so as to perceive the most fundamental reality of that thing. This process leads to insight into the basic reality of whatever is being inspected. Put it all together and 'Vipassana Bhavana' means the cultivation of the mind, aimed at seeing in a special way that leads to insight and to full understanding.

 

In Vipassana mediation we cultivate this special way of seeing life. We train ourselves to see reality exactly as it is, and we call this special mode of perception 'mindfulness.' This process of mindfulness is really quite different from what we usually do. We usually do not look into what is really there in front of us. We see life through a screen of thoughts and concepts, and we mistake those mental objects for the reality. We get so caught up in this endless thought stream that reality flows by unnoticed. We spend our time engrossed in activity, caught up in an eternal pursuit of pleasure and gratification and an eternal flight from pain and unpleasantness. We spend all of our energies trying to make ourselves feel better, trying to bury our fears. We are endlessly seeking security. Meanwhile, the world of real experience flows by untouched and untasted. In Vipassana meditation we train ourselves to ignore the constant impulses to be more comfortable, and we dive into the reality instead. The ironic thing is that real peace comes only when you stop chasing it. Another Catch-22.

 

continued: http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe1-4.html

Edited August 12, 2008 by xabir2005

[innerspace_cadet]

Ian,

 

I used to fool myself that joining an "ism" like Buddhism or Taoism was the answer, but always got distracted by the "trappings" such as beliefs, cosmologies, deities, afterlife, etc.

 

My ultimate spiritual goal is not enlightenment, but to attain tranquility. If something bad or difficult happens to me, I would like to be able to react with mental ripples, not mental tidal waves. If it takes decades, an entire lifetime of practice, I am willing to do it.

 

I just need to settle upon the right practice and stick with it.

[Sahaj Nath]

given the private conversations i've been having with a number of people on this site, i'm surprised you haven't gotten more responses from those going through the exact same thing.

 

 

I think I bounce from one practice to another because I'm never sure which practice or meditation method is right for me. How do I know which method or practice to stick with?

 

 

it doesn't really matter. what matters is that you stick with it. are you being honest about your ultimate goal? you might want to ask yourself in a deeper way because is seem like you're worried you might be missing something good if you settle on a practice. but what could be better than the discipline of settling in? IF that's really your ultimate goal.

 

if you find that deep down you honestly want more, that's fine, too. you just need to really be clear with yourself what you want.

 

 

If it takes decades, an entire lifetime of practice, I am willing to do it.

 

I just need to settle upon the right practice and stick with it.

 

 

if you are truly willing to do it, this post is unnecessary. just do it. because unless you are not willing, there's no reason why you couldn't reach tranquility fairly soon. if you're willing, then do what you already know you need to do.

 

it's hard to get more simple than zen practice. if you've already got a bit of a thing for buddhism, you might want to go there. very simple. not a whole lot of stuff to memorize or practice. zen just keeps it real.

 

 

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[Gerard]

My personal advice:

 

1. Control your mind. Easier said than done, Practice quiet meditation while sitting, lying down or walking. Different visualization methods in order to achieve a state of one-pointedness is a good measure of your progress in meditation.

 

2. Practice a moving energy art. There are many, they are all good. Chinese Kung Fu, Pencak Silat, Kalaripayattu, Boabom, Qi Dao, etc.

 

That's all about it.

 

Don't change from method to method and avoid falling trap of the so-called spiritual materialism:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiritual_materialism

 

I like this part:

 

Psychological materialism is the belief that a particular philosophy, belief system, or point of view will bring release from suffering.

 

In essence all methods are the same. Stick to one and make sure you have fun!

 

Good luck in your spiritual development.

 

[seadog]

Well I think one problem many of us have is we think we are already immortal.Deep down we believe we'll always have another chance to get things right.Try another practice,think a bit more about- how we should be and what we should do.

If our hearts are true and our intentions clear,if we are cognintent of the fact that this life as we know it can end in an instant, then there is no time for regrets or half assed actions.

How we value life is demonstrated in our daily deeds.

Are we awake

Or

half a sleep

wondering.