False realizations

[hagar]

To me this is really over-complicating matters. All of the 'perspectives' you are talking about are just thoughts! Simply observe them, get the juice out of their process, and then let them go.

 

NW

 

I'm oversimplifying for sure. But how to get the juice out?

 

h

[NeutralWire]

Well how do you bring ruminations of any kind to an end? When a certain feeling of having deeply absorbed the meaning of something emerges I would say. Just absorbing it, not trying to find the perfect words or ideas... let those come or not come. But the feeling is there that you understand -- or at least, understand all you can.

 

I should stop banging on about it, but Bardon's Hermetics is so helpful here. Your very first exercises (before emptiness of mind) are to be able to sit and control your thoughts without interfering, steer them this way or that, observe them, keep them to a particular subject, etc. (And with your life as well).

 

This gets you used to the idea that your thoughts are very productive of insights, very much an intimate part of yourself -- but also, an activity that you can treat as any other activity. A passion for too much thinking is the same as any other passion. So when it's time to sit and absorb your experiences in your understanding, you do that, and when it's time to stand up and do something else, you do something else!

 

All best wishes,

 

~NeutralWire~

[Ian]

Detachment is another form of attachment. I just don't do it. It's one thing to take things less seriously, but it's another thing to attempt to detach yourself from experience. Detachment is an experience in and of itself. How can you detach from an experience of detachment?

 

My experience is that detachment means different things to different people. But, dare I say it, "genuine" detachment doesn't require any active lack of interest, it just involves treating everything as equal. No part of one's experience is any less present or immediate thereby.

 

 

How to escape the meta-stuff; that's actually my real question.

 

 

Well, what do those thoughts actually want? To understand everything perfectly? Under what circumstances might they be satisfied?

 

Is there any reason to treat them as other than normal thoughts which just seek every avenue to reproduce and divert you from being there doing what you're doing?

[宁]

hagar,

 

this may be off-topic... the sequence from Big Blue reminded me of a movie that i've looked for for five years now... i dare mention it here, in case someone knows about it.

 

the story was like this, a young man somehow gets a job at a car junkyard, where he meets a weird old man.

the old man makes him do all kinds of stuff, that seem nonsense and painful at times, but they were a method of "cleansing". the idea was to open the doors of perception. the old man was desperately trying to escape the clutches of this world, by escaping an eagle, that was both reality and metaphor.

he had a funny looking mecanical plane, in which he took off to confront the eagle...

he "died", but left a sum of very interesting instructions to the young man...

something like "one of the trees in the forest is yours. go and find it" "feel the things between the eye" and so on...

it was a story of modern shamanism, inspired by something i guess.

really cool movie. i was into Castaneda at that time. it was on TV, in English, done in the '90's i guess. didn't quite make it to catch it's name...

[freeform]

Simply observe them, get the juice out of their process, and then let them go.

 

The juice needs to be let go of too. There is nothing to 'get' out of it... nature doesn't get anything from cycling through the seasons. it just happens. If you try to keep the juice it ends up becoming another blockage.

 

So Hagar -

 

3) let it cycle. Let the understanding arise and become a communicable thought, then let it die and dissolve into nothingness, emptiness.

 

the meta-stuff you're talking about is the process of the thoughts dying... 'escaping the meta-stuff' actually involves going deeper and more meta... notice how if you go meta-meta-meta-meta thought the thought becomes less distinct, with more space, less communicable... untill eventually becoming meaningless emptiness... So go more meta and quicker not allowing your mind to get stuck with it... it's a very kinesthetic experience - like expanding space.

 

You might be getting stuck because you allow too much time - because with time the meta-thought actually condenses into a 'normal' thought and you reverse the yin/death cycle before it's complete...

 

One of my teachers speaks of 'stuff' and 'spaces' - every thought has a ratio of stuff to spaces... most people have way more stuff than space... the universe on a micro and macro level has huge amount of space peppered with a little stuff... The yang cycle of thought involves going from space to stuff and the yin cycle involves going from stuff to space... This gives another perspective as to why Max asks his students to describe their experience after a powerful opening... it's a way of bringing a little more stuff into all that space - to get the ratio balanced.

[NeutralWire]

freeform -

 

The juice needs to be let go of too. There is nothing to 'get' out of it.

 

I think there is! But I possibly am not explaining it too well... when you say this:

 

nature doesn't get anything from cycling through the seasons. it just happens. If you try to keep the juice it ends up becoming another blockage.

 

... I think I see the issue -- I'm not saying you 'try to keep the juice'.

 

It is a good analogy to drinking actual fruit juice: some of it is absorbed, some of it excreted. This is not a process equivalent to 'nothing happening', something is gained from it -- experience, nutrition, taste sensation, exchange of energy, however you want to look at it. So it's not a case of 'trying to hold onto' anything but of savouring deeply and extracting nutrients, ie. understanding one's experiences and integrating them into the psyche.

 

This is what allows one to 'let go' in the way you mean. It is something that happens naturally once the experience is integrated. Whereas, as we know, experience that people cannot integrate into the psyche (in the worst example, trauma) cannot have its nutrients of wisdom extracted and cannot have its waste excreted, and there to my mind is where you have a blockage.

 

In this case your thoughts run compulsively towards the object and trying to understand it, but the nutrients aren't extracted and the quieting-down does not occur.

 

 

What you are saying here:

 

One of my teachers speaks of 'stuff' and 'spaces' - every thought has a ratio of stuff to spaces... most people have way more stuff than space...

 

... I would agree with 100%.

 

I could say it this way: the first Bardon exercise is about observing thoughts until the torrent slows, and finally there are just a couple of distant thoughts arising, then nothing.

 

This is very first thing you do in Bardon, and my point is that after that, you are living 'close to the silence'. You know the difference between the feeling of there really being something to think (that is an insight or an a-ha moment to be savoured) versus just thinking in the way of running on and grasping, which is equivalent to an untrained consciousness. And you know how to allow things to wind down and empty out, which I think is quite similar to what you are talking about.

 

All best wishes,

 

~NeutralWire~

[freeform]

Thanks NW, I really enjoyed your perspective!

 

I'm coming from a slightly different paradigm, which would be hard to explain. It's not any more 'true' than yours, but it's more applicable to my practice at the moment.

 

The principle is that I cannot be any more nourished by anything. The taste of the juice is to be enjoyed and pissing it out is to be enjoyed - the nutrition was always already inside me, the juice was already inside me, and my little experience with it just opens my awareness to find that I was already nourished... It's hard for me to explain - it's a perspective born out of the yin cycle - so it subtly demonstrates the prejudices of that.

 

You mention 'integrating'. From my experience the integration was already there before the thought came up and it re-integrates when the thought goes back down. None of this is 'true', but imagine in your belly a "0" and in your head a "1". 0 = infinite space and 1 = finite unit 0 contains all possible 1's but only ever all together - so no 1 is separate from another 1 within 0.

 

In other words if you experience 0, you experience everything all at once but never anything specific - never anything other than everything. This is ultimate integration. All experience arises from 0 and moves up to 1 then back down to 0. You cant add or subtract from 0 as it's infinite - it contains everything and nothing all at once... but you can add and subtract with 1.

 

As a society we have a fascination with the 1 and a deep-seated fear of 0. So when you say about 'gaining' some kind of benefit to the average western mind (whatever that is!) it's a case of adding more 1s. of course I know that's not what you mean. If I transform your perspective into my paradigm, then the Aha! moment creates an environment that facilitates the return to 0 ('integration')...

 

anyway - thanks.

 

[NeutralWire]

Freeform - you're welcome and thanks in return!

 

I dimly grasped your perspective for a second but I think (as so often) the differences in practice mean a necessarily different way of stating (at least). This bit makes sense for sure:

 

If I transform your perspective into my paradigm, then the Aha! moment creates an environment that facilitates the return to 0 ('integration')...

 

And I guess I'm kind of with you. I think the directional elements are what is different... I can sense that, like me, you enjoy being flipped upside down haha. Moments like this are really why I like belonging to forums... what you say about addiction to 1 in the west mirrors what a lot of Bardonists say, but it's something that I personally haven't seen in a cultural way yet. I will have to think about that and digest carefully...

 

All best wishes,

 

~NeutralWire~

 

EDIT: There is a strange east-west conference going on with our avatars!

Edited February 18, 2009 by NeutralWire

[forestofsouls]

The only thing that has worked for me (if I understand the gist of the question) is to repeat my techniques over and over again: experiential sensory contact with whatever is arising. In some circles, this is called bare attention, in Zen it is sometimes referred to as contemplation. In the Bahiya Sutta, the Buddha teaches about letting the sound be without the listener.

 

If it is a pressure in the foot, then just be with that. If it is rambling chatter, then let it be that. Over time, my grasping at these objects has diminished. My interest in classifying/conceptualizing/inner talking about things has diminished as I realize that it leads nowhere.

 

Shinzen Young teaches the trickle-down theory of enlightenment: if you do the technique perfectly over time, then eventually your mind re-wires itself. This is the ultimate doing-non-doing--- planting the seeds and letting them grow.

[三江源]

... eventually your mind re-wires itself.

 

this one! this is the one that happens.

[freeform]

NW - I'm glad you don't quite 'get' what I'm on about. It means it's something new, and you're approaching it with curiosity, which makes me smile. Turning things on their head is an under-rated pastime!

 

Something that doesn't make too much sense (your deeper, subliminal parts will understand) - is listening to the spaces. Cat mentioned how Dirk listens to spaces - I've learnt this from my teacher too... Invite your attention to concentrate on the spaces rather than the stuff... when you talk to people, when you read, when you listen to a spiritual teacher... it subtly changes your entire universe.

 

"the Buddha teaches about letting the sound be without the listener. " - I love that

 

EDIT

 

NW - your avatar looks like an ornate western-spiritualist ipod!

Edited February 18, 2009 by freeform

[NeutralWire]

Something that doesn't make too much sense (your deeper, subliminal parts will understand) - is listening to the spaces.

 

Oh no, that part makes perfect sense...

 

The thing which made less sense to me was that 'zero' which you said was everything where 'one' was something... you seemed to be saying this was equivalent to yin and yang respectively, but it's a much different view of yin and yang than I'm used to.

 

To me + and - are normally seen as balanced, and the void neither of them, so neither has the greater claim on silence -- is this what you meant about being skewed towards yin?

 

This is why I feel the difference in systems being practiced is very important. The movement I was talking about in the Hermetic conception is not 'back down to silence', but about the unconscious becoming conscious (water to air) in the ordinary mind. In other words, expression to me is what allows integration. Because then things can settle. Sometimes I thought you were saying this, sometimes I thought otherwise lol.

 

Your avatar looks like an ornate western-spiritualist ipod!

 

It's iGod

 

NW

Edited February 18, 2009 by NeutralWire

[Spectrum]

None of this is 'true', but imagine in your belly a "0" and in your head a "1". 0 = infinite space and 1 = finite unit 0 contains all possible 1's but only ever all together - so no 1 is separate from another 1 within 0.

 

In other words if you experience 0, you experience everything all at once but never anything specific - never anything other than everything. This is ultimate integration. All experience arises from 0 and moves up to 1 then back down to 0. You cant add or subtract from 0 as it's infinite - it contains everything and nothing all at once... but you can add and subtract with 1.

 

freeform that is everything and nothing i ever wanted to say

[freeform]

freeform that is everything and nothing i ever wanted to say

 

 

NW - I don't want to derail the topic and great discussion here (I've already done enough of that, innit) - so I'll start a new topic - or hijack a more relevant existing one

 

EDIT - new 0s and 1s topic here

Edited February 19, 2009 by freeform

[Spectrum]

lol ....kinda like when the west hijacked zero to come up with math that almost works, until it breaks down into infinite numbers.