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WhyNotThink's avatar

I had these thoughts after several encounters with this experiment. WHAT IS MEDITATION THEN? These are just my definitions out of rationality, not from any claim of a "spiritual transmission”.

1. many people think contemplation is meditation. Like every translator of Marcus Aurelius titled his book “Meditations”. It is not! It is Contemplations. (I like that book, one of my favorites.) But not our subject here.

2. Many people think visualization is meditation. Nico Cost used it, visualizing a starry sky, and the thrilling feeling of that vastness against my smallness. He suggested to label it as the love of the universe, showering down on me. Yes, maybe that would be a doorway into a great feeling, (but is that meditation or spirituality?)

3. The only one word in English or any other human language that approaches meditation is “SILENCE”. It is a NO-THING. It has no qualities. No concepts, no languages nor communications. (We could claim a feeling of resonance.) There is no movement, nor any space/time continuum. So, no location, non-temporal, no light no dark. Nothing from the material realm about it, no limits from the speed of light.

I propose that Silence IS what some people call “the spiritual realm”. MEDITATION makes the claim that you can apprehend that. BUT HOW?

AND WHY? One way to simplify why, it is to say, why – because it is happening. I am doing it right now. Maybe that is enough.

HOW is the instruction: Try to keep your mind as empty as possible. Don’t resist thoughts, but also let them fly by as you focus on your breathing. But we have to look at how thoughts can “fly-by”?

WHAT FLOWS THROUGH YOUR MIND? And why is it different than what flows through my mind? We can conclude that there is a built-in preference mechanism in each of us, that focuses our individual thoughts. But we (I) said, silence has no qualities. I am going to propose that we cannot have silence as a preference, because without qualities, there is nothing to visualize, no handles to grab hold of it, and no way to set it up as our priority. So, the only way to get to silence is to NOT PREFER everything else.

A thought comes up – I don’t prefer that. A thought comes up – I don’t prefer that. A thought comes up – I don’t prefer that. The process is a negation, the skill is how to not to pick-up a thought. Or since they come pretty fast, how to “set-down” a thought. It is not a very direct route toward Silence.

Anyhow, without any expectations, it shouldn’t be too upsetting.

I should really stop here. But I’ll add one supposition. Maybe there could come a point where you can step in and out of silence at will? Like going through a doorway. For instance, I claim I can step in and out of emotional reaction at will. No more difficult than going through an open door. It is so easy, that I have no fear of letting emotions play; and my life is richer for it, not constrained. Reactions are weightless for me; they have no impact on my being and they don’t automatically create actions, (that I later regret). (Other people’s repeated reactions can be annoying).

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Librarian's avatar

I sometimes post on why-not-think, so I see the new posts as they are created.

Right now I am in the middle of a large project to upload a detailed Russian (Asian) history. The particular chapters in these weeks are about the Mongolian empire. So when I saw "Mongolian Music - Boerte Gobi" I had to check it out. The video is stylized with vast scenes of Mongolia and the desert, and a cast of Mongolian looking characters, with costumes.

Who knows how the look of it and the music relates to the 700 or 800 years ago that we are studying, but it is fascinating. So I participated in the meditation experiment, which isn't about Mongolia.

Without considering any expectations that might be built into the word "meditation", I would say that sitting here reveals something about the programmed me. I can see that I gravitate toward my Librarian-Project, and consider what I would like to present next. How would I write about it? I can "sort-of" let it go, but not really. It comes back in many variations, and it is not a pest. These are what I presently value. If I continue with this experiment (of looking), will I see how I formulated those values, and how perhaps I could alter them? Would I find a direction toward which I want to alter them?

I think that I am content to work as Librarian for now. I am thinking that any alteration will make itself known clearly enough. If nothing changes, I will stay with my present contentment. I have no yearning or feeling of incompleteness.

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