Hi Peter,

I think I understand what you’re saying about the fear of emptiness as we rest in the space of self-emptying (through meditation). I have experienced this I think, but I believe only within the first 5 minutes or so when I’m still waiting for my overactive thoughts to settle the hell down. The purpose of meditation for me is to calm myself, escape my anxiety, and it works, but I don’t experience joy through it. This brings me back to an earlier thread where we discussed happiness and the “flow of life”. My words will fall short, I know, but as I tried to express in that thread, things seem to only make some sense when I feel a strong connection with and trust in that “flow”, no matter how good my life is. When I was younger I thought differently. Back then obtaining the things that the world values brought me happiness, or so I thought. But I am middle-aged now and my feelings have changed. I wonder if this happens to a lot of people, if as we age we become less satisfied with those things that once satisfied us, so we seek answers to the bigger questions we’ve had all along but were too busy (or too satisfied) to bother with. And it’s not only our increasing age that pushes us to find answers, but also challenging times as we’ve all experienced over the past few years with the pandemic and everything else…I think there are a lot of us out here who just want to rest in truth and goodness…but where does one find truth and goodness? That’s where our searching leads us, I believe. And if we move in the right direction, I think things start to feel less wrong and more right, less emptiness, more joy, less meditation, more contemplation…because we’re now in the flow.

B

The truth for me is faceted and whole. Everything spoken about on this thread simultaneously is and isn’t. We could all go round in circles defining various things.

When we read we interpret language using our own knowledge. The word contemplation doesn’t make sense to me when it comes to meditation as the word is associated with thinking. Internally, I translate contemplation to observing or being mindful. We all have our own unique perspectives and they all are part of the truth.

Goodness? For me it’s everywhere even when we don’t notice it because we’re too busy with thinking or other things. Learning to take the time to stop and appreciate it is key.

Even with truth and goodness there is suffering to varying degrees.

Hi Brandy

Ah I’ve never heard of the phrase! Thank you for explaining! I wasn’t trying to criticise. Just highlighting my point that perspectives are different. I’m glad that I understand a little more about what you meant. Although I will have to look it up in more detail.

Wishing you all the best! 🙏❤️

Definitely, Brandy is excellent at expressing herself. My background is quite different hence my confusion. I know of regular prayer and am vaguely aware of rosary and chants. My knowledge of what contemplative prayer is was lacking, so I was trying make sense of things as best I could from my own knowledge. But to understand the truth, my perspective alone isn’t enough. Brandy’s explanation shined a light on the truth. Just used that as an example to express an eastern perspective I’d come across on truth.

I’m very much a fan of eastern philosophy. Mostly Chinese. A lot of the quotes are quite new to me. I have enjoyed learning and trying to apply what I’ve learned through eastern philosophy and practices.

The Tao Te Ching has been my favourite book since my teens. Part of what I appreciate is how the translation changes the meaning of the text.

The last line contains many variations.

Therefore consider: advantage comes from having things
And usefulness from having nothing.

Thus being is beneficial,
but usefulness comes from the void.

Thus do we
create what is
to use what is not.

The way I conceptualise it based on my own experience is similar to the ego and the watcher. When I was younger I had no awareness of the watcher. I was all ego filling it. For a while the ego was afraid of meditation. Afraid to be set aside for a short time. With time it was no longer afraid and awareness of the watcher grew. More space grew within the watcher, the ego grew a little smaller. Within that space, happiness grew. My ego didn’t need to be at the forefront all of the time. Of course, frequently it still is. Now, I find my ego is associated with experiences of anxiety.

I heard of a talented meditator that experienced thought for only 30% of the day.

Hi Tilmar

I like the virilization technique which doesn’t sound weird to me… all the best people have a little weird 🙂

Helcat, One of the things I apricate about eastern thought like the Toa Te Ching is that its a reminder not to hold on to words to tightly. Like a good poem one should give the words some space to breath.  I also apricate the emphases on experience rather then believing.  The latter is when, I think, we tend to mistake the words we use for the things that the words can only point to. The word tree is not a tree.

Interestingly thier is a old Christian practice – Apophatic theology – which also uses negation (emptiness?) as a path to affirmation.  Apophatic was a practice of unsaying anything one said especially when what is being talked about is Transcendent.  (There are those that argue that negation is nihilistic though that is a trap one could fall into if one mistakes the map for the territory)

In the Toa Te Ching – The name that can be named is not the eternal Name – The Nameless is the Source of Heaven and Earth – the named is the Mother of the Ten thousand Things.  In the Geneses Garden story Adam is given the task of naming (the first scientist?) . I picture Adam excitedly telling G_d about his day naming this and that as if he discovered that which he named and G_d smiling to her self. Imagine if instead G_d becoming upset yelling at Adam that he broke creation by getting a name wrong.  Yet that is what we often do to one another.

The word/name tree is not the eternal Tree, naming, measuring, judging creates the Ten thousand things while the Nameless is the Source (of experience?)  Watts associated this notion with the fact that we tend not to notice the background of the object even though we can’t discern the object without the background. To name the Horse a horse Adam needed to separate the suchness that is Horse from the background of which we are apart of. Once named we forget about the background and consider the horse as separate from other things named including ourselves.  Through the task of naming duality arises, I am this not that. I am the name I give myself  separate from the eternal Nameless (emptiness). 

We can’t experience motion without relationship with other objects to measure against. (The circle without circumference and center is everywhere – we are each the “emptiness that makes the wheel work”??? – Motion creates Life). We can’t ‘see’ the object without its relationship, context, from the background. The error we make is assuming that this relationship to our experience means separateness. Believing we are separate, we suffer. Confronting the notion of duality though negation the background (emptiness – as we do not ‘see’ it just as we do not see light only what the light illuminates) becomes the Source it is rather then the naming of the object illuminated that we ‘pull’ out of It . The naming being a kind of game we get to play, the Ten Thousand things after all, work for us.  We are not brought into the ‘world‘, implying separate from it, but emerge out of IT.

🙂 Whose wired now. 🙂

On a practical level – perhaps?  I’ve spent a lot of time working on undoing the my attachment to identity, to naming. Undoing the message that you are your tribe, you are your job, you are your feelings, your thinking… you are a ‘identity’…. (Nothing like a perceived threat to a notion of identity to bring out the ego protector.)  I suspect with the current attachment to words, mistaking the map for the territory, that we have made the transition through the second half of life, where we are to let go of such things, more difficult. My thought is that maybe the language of negation (emptiness) is the ‘slap’ needed to break us out of that habit?

Last night as I lay in bed I wondered if it wasn’t emotions and thoughts keeping me up but the relentless naming. Taking a note from Timar instead of naming I went to that “weight inside… and sort of like press on it” then let it flow… There is a lightness to having a thought or emotion and not feeling a need to name it. There is a time for that, just maybe not all the time. I wondered could the nothingness and emptiness hinted at be just that space that exists before the naming?

That song brought me back. Thanks for that Roberta. Of course, back when I enjoyed the feeling of the song but didn’t really listen…  “mountains are mountains and waters are waters… after, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters”

(Repost to make it easier to read)

A horse with no name
“On the first part of the journey
I was looking at all the life
There were plants and birds and rocks and things
There was sand and hills and rings
The first thing I met was a fly with a buzz
And the sky with no clouds
The heat was hot and the ground was dry
But the air was full of sound

I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name
It felt good to be out of the rain
In the desert you can’t remember your name
‘Cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain

After two days in the desert sun
My skin began to turn red
And after three days in the desert fun
I was looking at a river bed
And the story it told of a river that flowed
Made me sad to think it was dead

You see I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name
It felt good to be out of the rain
In the desert you can’t remember your name
‘Cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain

After nine days I let the horse run free
‘Cause the desert had turned to sea
There were plants and birds and rocks and things
There was sand and hills and rings
The ocean is a desert with its life underground
And a perfect disguise above
Under the cities lies a heart made of ground
But the humans will give no love

You see I’ve been through the desert on a horse with no name
It felt good to be out of the rain
In the desert you can’t remember your name
‘Cause there ain’t no one for to give you no pain
La la la la la la..

Dear Tilmar

The chemical/emotions could also be a two way street so sometimes the emotions cause chemical changes and sometimes the emotions trigger chemical changes. check out research into mind gut connection & also heart mind.

It is interesting that when one points to oneself we usually point to the heart area and not the head and when we say someone has gone screwy we point to the head and do a circular motion.  We also have phrases like gut instinct and heartbreak,  warm hearted or a heart of stone.

Hi everyone

What comes first… I think both can be true and maybe why things like depression can become such a trap to fall into – feeling depressed about being depressed – feeling feeding being, being feeding feeling…

I’ve heard it said that we swim in the ocean of mind and that perhaps our notion of consciousness is too narrow. The thought being that eyes, ears, skin, heart, lungs… all have a kind of consciousness, as would plants and animals, all adding input to the ALL.
Just imagining all the cells and microbes that make up this body I think of as Peter, each cell with its own kind of consciousness… Would the cells feel themselves as part of the whole? As below so above, the drop of water contains the ocean.

Pondering the notion of emptiness, I recalled taking an Art class for the intimidated. On the first day were given a blank white canvas and asked to draw a bowl of fruit. Everyone stared at the blank canvas like a dear in headlights, afraid to put the first mark on the canvas. The blank canvas held all possibilities while drawing on it would limit those possibilities. Each act a act of creation and destruction, an affirmation, and a negation… everyone hesitated, afraid of making the wrong choice.
Of course, the joke was on us as the canvas nature never changes, even when covered its is always blank, never loosing any of its possibilities. Why do we assume the white canvas is itself empty? Why wouldn’t a red canvas also be blank? Why do we trust the reasoning that making a mark, naming something, changes the nature of what is marked what is named?

I wonder if I really let my Self really ‘Know’, what might change. I hesitate like a dear in headlights…

Interesting observation Roberta – when one points to oneself, we usually point to the heart area.
Campbell suggested that one of the ways to look at the chakras (western mind) was psychologically, where the first level was Id, second the will to pleasure, third the will to power, fourth Individuation, fifth the will to power directed inward to ‘master’ one Self, sixth the will to pleasure turned inwards to a realization of love of others as our Self (subject and object still separate), and seven Unity, no subject no object (no nameing’s), all extinguished in the ‘light/fire”.

Jung observed that the second half of life is the time to seek out an integrated Self, letting go of the base drives and find our way to the heart chakra and relationship with the capital s Self. Jung suggesting that any higher-level experiences reinforcing the heart chakra but not meant to ‘sit’ in, except for the few who would devote their lives to it. Jung felt that in general the western ‘Mind’ was not capable of the discipline required to let go of our attachment to our notion of mind, logic, reason…

I sometimes wonder if the monk or hermit lifestyle would work for me, then I think of the rules and the isolation and suspect maybe not so much. I’m ok with that, the heart chakra as a space to be feels doable to me.

You might enjoy Richard Wagamese’s meditation of being in ones body
“When I allow myself to feel my body, when I can inhabit it and allow myself to close off the world beyond my flesh. I become who I am – energy and spirit. I am not my mind. I am not my brain. I am stardust, comets, nebulae and galaxies. I am trees and wind and stone. I am space. I am emptiness and wholeness at the same time. That is when my body sings to me, a glorious ancient song redolent with mystery seeking to remain mystery. Connecting to it, living with it, becoming it even for a moment, I am healed and made more.“