Does anyone here practice

[innerspace_cadet]

I have recently read "The Method of No-Method" about the Chinese Zen practice of Silent Illumination. I must say it is an excellent book, and I recommend it highly to anyone interested. It is a very simple, yet difficult method of practicing meditation. First, you relax your body, then simply cultivate an awareness of "just sitting" without thinking about anything else. The sifu in this book describes 5 levels of cultivation that one goes through during this practice. Once I finish my 40 day mantra practice, I will begin Silent Illumination wholeheartedly.

 

Does anyone here practice it? Any experiences to share?

[Adam West]

Hi there InnerSpace Cadet!

 

I have practiced Silent Illumination on and off over the years. I find it a very effective practice. It is simultaneous Shamatha-Vipassana, with the body that sits as the object - one concentrates on the body as a whole and is simultaneously aware of the body and sitting. However, I don't find the body an attractive object of meditation. I prefer the mind itself, which is more like Mahamudra; or Advaita awareness of awareness. One gently notices and sustains awareness of mind as object of meditation and insight. Leading to consciousness of the subtle mind and very subtle mind - leading to Tao or the unconditioned. Good stuff indeed. This will take us all the way. Nothing else needed. All else is something you have added to yourself; and an interesting and entertaining distraction!

 

Hope this helps!

 

In kind regards,

 

Adam.

[Aetherous]

Thanks for the book recommendation, innerspace cadet. Silent illumination (shikantaza) is the highest method of meditation.

[AugustLeo]

.

[seadog]

I have recently read "The Method of No-Method" about the Chinese Zen practice of Silent Illumination. I must say it is an excellent book, and I recommend it highly to anyone interested. It is a very simple, yet difficult method of practicing meditation. First, you relax your body, then simply cultivate an awareness of "just sitting" without thinking about anything else. The sifu in this book describes 5 levels of cultivation that one goes through during this practice. Once I finish my 40 day mantra practice, I will begin Silent Illumination wholeheartedly.

 

Does anyone here practice it? Any experiences to share?

Best of practice

Silent Illumination whole heartedly-great view.

[sheng zhen]

These last years Ive been doing this as my main practice. Stillness meditation is definately the one practice that has brought me the most effective developement and healing.

 

When I look at my past practices, with advanced visualization, colours, images, concepts, superduper high divine energies, communication with the highest most divine beings in the universe, etc, nothing can compare to what I have recieved through stillness meditation these last years.

 

The first meditation I learned was stillness meditation. It was also the simplest I have learned. And now I have realized it was the best meditation I have ever learned.

[Spectrum]

Shhhh

Hushh

Listen

[rain]

As I mentioned before, I am rummaging through the attic of a prodigious memory and dusting off research and the conclusions that I came to in the period of roughly 1975-85. Some parts of the story have been close to the front of this attic and are the Hellenic ingredients that became part of the Hellenistic milieu and how they contributed to the conception of 'demon', but one thing kept nagging at me and that was that one of the previous posts had mentioned the change of 'Deva' to 'devil'. I remembered that this predated Christianity and was the result of Persian uses that relate to Zoroastrianism. The Zoroastrians 'demonized' the 'devas' and the Indians demonized the 'ahura/asuras', tit for tat you might say. It is also to the Zoroastrians that we owe the notion of a conflict between 'good' and 'evil', and in particular the root of evil in the notion of 'the lie', which leads in Christianity to Satan as the father of lies.

 

The most interesting thing during the Hellenistic period is the conflation of daimons as spirits related to generation and fertility with evil spirits, and the source of this, rather than being developing Christian orthodoxy, is the various Gnostic sects, to whom the created world and its creator were evil, and thus the daimons as agents of generation in the world were agents of evil.

 

At this time I don't want to get into a long digression about gnosticism, but suffice it to say that if anyone can be viewed as the 'demonizers' of the Gods it was the gnostics and not the early Church as it was developing during the Patristic period. The Pagan Philosophers remained loyal to the old Gods practically to the end of the Hellenistic age and perhaps beyond, and some in the developing Church was only too anxious to use such sources as the Sibylline Oracles and the Hermetica as tools of conversion.

 

One of the things that amazed me when I started seriously studying Plato in the early 1980s was how much of so called 'Christian' ethics had been cribbed from Pagan sources, in particular Plato. This is one of the reasons that Justin Martyr could think of Socrates as a pre-Christian Christian. He was a Platonist who converted to Christianity and he must have had passages like the following, the conclusion of Plato's Gorgias, in mind, '...you may let anyone despise you as a fool and do you outrage, if he wishes, yes, and you may cheerfully let him strike you with that humiliating blow...' (W. D. Woodhead translation, cited from The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Bollingen, 1980, p. 307). Sound familiar? Someone who was really being really 'cheeky' might even say to turn the other cheek. That is only one of many I could site and the 'Golden Rule' appears in the writings of one of Plato's professional rivals Isocrates (As well as in both Confucius and Mencius) and may even have been proverbial in Hellenic culture.

 

The combination of these echoes of Pagan ethics in Jesus preaching (as well as Paul) and the need to proselytize among the educated classes would result in one of the most interesting myths that I have seen and it developed as a tool for the early Church to bolster its claim to being a 'universal', i.e. catholic church and this was the myth of the Ancient Theologians. The idea is that God revealed himself to man both through the 'his word' delivered to the Jews by Moses and the Prophets because of his covenant with Abraham, but also that the study of creation as had been done by the Pagans was a source of revelation. This gives two 'books', the 'word of God' given through the Prophets and also the book of Nature which reveals God through 'his creation'. The readers of this 'book of nature' were the 'ancient theologians' starting with Hermes Trismegistus (because the Hermetic writings were not dated correctly), followed by Orpheus, Zoroaster, Plato and Aristotle. It was this belief as well as the ethical similarities that allowed the Church to integrate large amounts of Stoicism and Platonism, as well as Pagan Cosmology, into its doctrines during the Patristic period. Since Pagan Cosmology during the Hellenistic period was strongly animistic and therefore the Planets were animated beings, i.e. the Gods and these Planetary Gods became assimilated to, if not identified with, the notion of Planetary Angels. This associations survive into modern European languages both as the names of the Planets and also as the names of the days of the week in Romance Languages, whereas in more Germanic based languages they are the Teutonic/Nordic equivalents. On the other hand the Planets and the Gods as part of the created cosmos that imprisoned human souls as envisioned by the Gnostics effectively demonized the Gods.

 

So by the end of the Hellenistic period we have our concept of 'demon' more or less complete, its name comes largely from the Greek daimon, but its 'evil' nature as followers of the 'lie' comes from Zoroastrianism. Its association with sex and sexuality comes from the Philosophical traditions as they began to differentiate the various hierarchies of spiritual beings and survived into the middle ages as the incubbus and succubbus which were the Western equivalent of the fox spirits, or for that matter the marvelously malevolent tree spirit of 'A Chinese Ghost Story', (One of my favorite movies and because of its echoes of esoteric practices worthy of a commentary in its own right.), which fed on the vital energies of people, which populate Chinese lore.

 

Next time we will look at the early Buddhist influence in China and see those demonized asuras, the distant cousins by the way of the Norse Aesir, and how they influence the development of the concept of 'demon' in China.

 

Short bibliography:

 

For Hermes Trismegisus and the ancient Theologians; see Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, especially the first part.

For the assimilation of the Pagan Gods; see Jean Seznec The Survival of the Pagan Gods and John Block Friedman, Orpheus in the Middle Ages.

 

pulse, repulse , -------------------------------------------