Deepening silence

[JustBe]

Originally Posted by Unseeking Seeker

@ JustBe - by deepening silence, what is alluded to is a kind of melding with the void, corresponding to senses becoming unfocused from objects, inducing a switchover to inner polarity of attention, all this effortlessly, with gently flowing agendaless intent … it is not so easy to put it in words.

Ok I understand you better now.

I’ve experienced this but it’s not engaging and being you entirely. Well in the initial activation of becoming aware of it at the lead, it was working solo. I’ve sat at a noisy social event and experienced it as a real life moment as that deep silence. Everyone fell silent with me. It was rather an interesting moment. This was part of understanding how silence that deep was a part of me.

Nowadays it’s integrated into being. I can summon it if I needed in various forms of my awareness, but ultimately it’s a stream within being that doesn’t fade or cease, unless I get reactive in my body, which is extremely rare. Most of my processors have reshuffled into an order more aligned to being..

[Unseeking Seeker]

Originally Posted by FallingLeaves

this sounds trite to me but anyway, who is the doer that thinks the silence needs to be deepened in the first place? If there is truly a void with silence and no doer, wouldn't whatever silence is already there be enough in and of itself? What is it that wants 'more'?

Yes. It is the gradual falling away of the seeker who seeks that reveals what already was and is.

Identity requires thought. Thought is preceded by a heart impulse. Why? Because the heart is not quiescent. Why is it not still? Because senses are externalised so attention oscillates. So, shifting focus within, away from duality to singularity is the ‘process’.

[eezi-ulgen]

When I choose to dissolve the constructs I built, there I am existing as I am Eternally....

Peace

[Redchic12]

Ah yes “the assemblage point”. Isn’t that what Carlos Castenada talked about?

[Miss Hepburn]

Originally Posted by Unseeking Seeker

How may this silence be deepened...

Practice.

[Nathaniel]

It seems to me there is a duality if there is silence and an observer of the silence.

The person can never escape the person because there is no person to begin with. Once the person is recognised as illusory what is left but silence.

Not silence as a concept but silence as it actually is.

There is no person here.

I am silence.

This.

Here.

Now.

[Unseeking Seeker]

@ Nathaniel ~ yes, the disappearance of identity, the ego reveals our true being. Ego is the veil, created by identification with body-mind, which makes us forget who we truly are. Silence rests thought, sans thought, ego cannot exist and thus the truth of Self in singularity is re-cognised.

[Unseeking Seeker]

Originally Posted by Miss Hepburn

Practice.

I look at it as a becoming rather than a practice. In an ever present flowing orientation of silence, carrying no residue of the past and looking not in the future, we embrace and release each pulsation fully and completely, thus becoming the unending renewal itself, effortlessly. Mind applies effort, heart celebrates.

[Wagner]

Originally Posted by Unseeking Seeker

The meditator meditates. Maybe chanting a mantra, visualisation or breath watching helps maintain focus, making attention single-pointed. Then that doing also ceases. Sans thought, all that is, is awareness self-aware in silence.

How may this silence be deepened without any doing, since the doer has disappeared and so doing has ceased?

Dharana, which is what you are describing in your first paragraph, is broken one-pointed concentration; one's attentiveness keeps getting swept away from its aim via the tenacious effluence of the vasanas, and vigilance must be willfully upheld in order to bring it back to the locality of the focus. When with effort this one-pointed concentration becomes persistent and steady--or apparently so, there are still "residual flickers" of interruption--it is called dhyana. At this stage one's mindfulness of the focus is absolute. If this state of near-perfected one-pointed concentration can be made to continue indefinitely, this being possible only through the sheer dint of habituation afforded by repeated practice, then the dualistic necessity of effort will be assuaged completely and the concentration becomes spontaneous as it were, and it is then called (savikalpa) samadhi; automatic, perfected one-pointed concentration. Metaphorically speaking, the contrast between dhyana and samadhi is like the difference between needing to intentionally push against a wall to maintain constant contact with it, as opposed to being drawn into the wall as if by a magnetic force.

Who or what remains, navigating the void?

It's not a "who or what" that remains . Rather, the apparatus which appeared to insist/subsist on the existence of distinction simply evaporates (for lack of a better word) and there just is, without even the support of the object of concentration. And this is called nirvikalpa samadhi (manolaya/temporary manonasa). Sri Ramana Maharshi compared the object of concentration used in meditation to a stick used to push all the other wood (i.e. the thoughts/vasanas) into a fire, and when all of that other wood is burnt up, the stick itself is thrown into the flame and consumed.

From a practical standpoint, the goal of any and all effort in meditation is to attain dhyana as long and as often as you can. The resulting samadhi over time will weaken and eventually destroy the vasanas forever, and this being accomplished, the state of manonasa will become perpetual, and this is called moksha.

[A human Being]

Originally Posted by Wagner

Dharana, which is what you are describing in your first paragraph, is broken one-pointed concentration; one's attentiveness keeps getting swept away from its aim via the tenacious effluence of the vasanas, and vigilance must be willfully upheld in order to bring it back to the locality of the focus.

Interesting choice of words.