No experts on meditation

[Mr Interesting]

This tree is wonderous, it is spectacular! And I find it is the only 'salvagable' way I might answer your question jonesboy and excuse, most humbly, my going off to the side, like this tree has, to do so.

Alike this tree I ended up somewhere and thought I would find the light but then it turned out it was actually to the side and not above as is usual so I went off to the side then went up where the light was stronger.

This is what it feels like and I don't actually know why the tree decided to go sideways but it might be that going straight up wasn't as good an idea as going to the side. But it looks like I feel here. I can't go straight up and give you an answer... I have to go to the side.

I put myself in the wrong place by questioning, the way I did, the insight dialogue... Boom!, the little seedling is actually going to find it well hard to go straight up because all the other trees are taking all the light, but by going off to the side I'm doing what not many trees do and even while it looks like a tree it's not doing what trees should do. Sorry mate, it's kinda ended up in the too hard bin... but, just like this tree, I'm hoping a certain beauty might avail.

[Gem]

Just going to continue along the train of listening because this isn't the listening where you listen to me and I listen to you to disseminate information we can remember for later on. The kind of listening here isn't that. This kind of listening is where we know things in a different way, not as memorised information, but as momentary awareness; and not to check each others validity against our memorised knowledge, but to understand each other with what we really mean. I have no intention to disseminate information nor have other preconceptions and you aren't a mere repository for my 'teachings'. We're both so much more. We're conscious, intelligent and living, and came here on extraordinary life paths. We can see the immensity of that. Not an immensity of grandure that makes me the expert and you the novice, that's so insignificant to what I'm saying, but the immensity of what it is the be here, what life has made us, and to be living right here at this very moment.

[Gem]

Originally Posted by Mr Interesting

This tree is wonderous, it is spectacular! And I find it is the only 'salvagable' way I might answer your question jonesboy and excuse, most humbly, my going off to the side, like this tree has, to do so.

Alike this tree I ended up somewhere and thought I would find the light but then it turned out it was actually to the side and not above as is usual so I went off to the side then went up where the light was stronger.

This is what it feels like and I don't actually know why the tree decided to go sideways but it might be that going straight up wasn't as good an idea as going to the side. But it looks like I feel here. I can't go straight up and give you an answer... I have to go to the side.

I put myself in the wrong place by questioning, the way I did, the insight dialogue... Boom!, the little seedling is actually going to find it well hard to go straight up because all the other trees are taking all the light, but by going off to the side I'm doing what not many trees do and even while it looks like a tree it's not doing what trees should do. Sorry mate, it's kinda ended up in the too hard bin... but, just like this tree, I'm hoping a certain beauty might avail.

Ok, because it's difficult to have something that's in a neat package, and actual conversations are rarely question and answer in form. Even here, restricted to text, there's no body language or those little sounds like 'hmmm' or the tones and volumes and timbres of voice. Most conversations are like the sound of flowing water as laughter bubbles over rocks and all nature of eddies affect the complexities of sound.

Once we resort to the discourse of knowledge such as something called 'insight listening' we find that a subject of listening which could fill many volumes, and does, opens us to stupendously vast discourse of knowledge on listening... but in all I have been informed of, I never once was told of the sensation of sounds. I portray this 'sensation of sound' by illustration: When you lie down next to the ocean and savour the sound of surf, how does it make you feel? How does it affect your body/mind? If I am there hearing that and feeling that way, am I lost to the listening? Quite the contrary, my entire being is enlivened by it.

Yes, it's all off the side, because we aren't pursuing something tangible, and even if we already know what the surf sounds like and can recognise that sound and know what it is, the sound of surf never grows old, never stale, never dead. Always new, fresh and alive.

[A human Being]

Y'know, Mr I, I must admit I've struggled with your posts: found them meandering; wanted you to get to the point by the express route rather than going around the houses; got images of Grandpa Simpson at the checkout.

Then it occurred to me that your posts almost read like a passage out of Ulysses at times, and I remember the problems I had reading that first time around, when I was thinking along linear lines and trying to put it all together like a jigsaw puzzle. And then I remembered that I learnt to enjoy reading it the second time around by letting it wash over me, rather than trying to make sense of it in a purely mental way.

So I've adopted this way of reading with your posts, and I must say I quite enjoy them They make a lot more sense to me, just not to the point where I can comment on the points you made

[Mr Interesting]

Yeah, I don't even know where it's going myself except it's kinda felt like the only way bring in how I see things. I started feeling it a while back and reading a post and sitting back wondering how something might be answered and huge amounts of interlinked ideas would make sense but then writing it all down would require whole books to allow all the relationships to sit with each other in a way that made sense so that was out the window and then it seemed the only way to approach things was with the stories that would have the same relationships.

And also it's been in reading a little of Jesus's parables and seeing almost the same discovery of relationships as the ideas about what the relationships were within the parables were given the time and space to make greater sense than an obvious literal translation. But as well, I'm not as well read as I could be and came across the word dilettante the other week and that seemed to describe my position quite accurately in that I don't really know what I'm doing but do it anyways simply because it makes a certain sense in and of itself... and it does though not in the get to the point by making a point but almost by confusing the issue and then letting time and intuition bring forth the sense of what's possibly really going on.

Getting this far it's already widening right out so I better stop but I do really enjoy Gem's honesty of self even whilst I think there's more to be said for the usefulness of narratives if we can hold them far enough away from ourselves.

[Gem]

The growing of things is a remarkable process of care and patience. We'd provide what is needed for the growth to thrive, yet not push the growing thing in haste. As a gardener I know how impatience leads to stifling the growth of things. Any growing thing already knows how to grow, and my job is only to provide the optimum conditions for growth.

We all know how to grow. As a gardener, I'm an expert on growing things, so I can give a tomato all it needs to thrive, and as a parent, you must know what the infant needs, but you can't teach that person how to grow. We already know how to live and grow, but we never learned how. We were alive and then we stayed alive. We did what we had to, learned survival from it, and carried on, much like that bent tree did, much the same as a straight tree does.

The aim of the conversation isn't focused as a goal, and not even on a progress. It focuses on the 'optimum conditions'. It's a bit of water on a hot day and a bit of mulch for protection. It's a small touch of organic matter for nutrition, and it's a matter of care. It's not so much an addition of patience as it is the removal of impatient expectations... as one would remove the caterpillars from the leaves and take out the weeds. The conversation is like the growth of the trees, the blowing of the breeze, the rustling of leaves, the following of streams, the living of dreams and what each other means.

[Gem]

https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.n...d7df70ad1a 52

[Mr Interesting]

Seems facebook has realised alot alot of us were using it as a photodump to score links to use other places... I know I used too but now it's a possible I don't know how to create so it's back to good old photobucket.

"It's not so much an addition of patience as it is the removal of impatient expectations... " speaks volumes that does Gem. A good metaphor all round this natural world there doing what it does and us able to gain sustenance by adjusting ourselves to it's cycles.

I went and saw a friend yesterday an he's an avid player of saxophone and jazz stylings and spoke of a question put to one of the greats of how can such complex note combinations be played so quickly using the brain? The answer being they can't, the brain, at least in a controlled way, just isn't fast enough.

[Gem]

I have no idea what scoring links is or what motivates it, but I suspect this might be one reason for my homepage being overwhelmed by unsolicited rubbish.

I generally think of the process of meditation practice as one of removal. Many think like, 'It made me more patient and calmer' but was it really the attainment of these or was it reducing the unconscious personal reactivity that we call 'impatience and stress', and the question could be raised: Is meditation the direct path to enlightenment and truth, or is it a means of removing obstacles and falsity? I presume, because it is normal in this setting, that people might think that this question is presented by me as a 'test' and I already know the answer, but I don't know the answer, I'm merely wondering. If I did know the answer, it would be necessarily of my memory, and that is really only a past/recycled thought about it, not an actual fact about it. It's most likely that there is no answer in particular, and the question doesn't presume there is one, so the question is merely a continuing of the conversation and only seeks response. A response is not an answer, you see, there's a difference.

Well, jazz is a mystery in all ways. Obviously the brain is making it happen, it thinks tune and listens simultaneously, and when there's no gap between the thought and the sound, you're in the pocket, man.

[VinceField]

Originally Posted by Gem

Is meditation the direct path to enlightenment and truth, or is it a means of removing obstacles and falsity?

Why not both?