The rambling of the mind

[Gem]

Hi,

I'm going to talk, but I have no interest in influencing people and their meditation techniques.

Meditation is the presence that continues throughout the changing experience. Equating the experience with meditation creates expectations and desires that meditation should be like this or that; however, people describe a vast range of experiences that occur during meditation, so it's obvious that no particular experience defines what meditation is... The word 'during' is relevant in the sense that meditation endures the mentioned variety of experiences.

This invariably comes back to you, and I use you in the generic sense because meditation must be a universal to all people. If it's a type of meditation, that's a personal practice, but the principle mediation is always the still presence of mind that remains throughout the changing experience.

It's often the case that the presence of mind is skittish, and change causes mental reactions that 'break' the trance-like spell of quiet beingness. That's quite normal and there is no reason to be disappointed, disheartened or deflated. The mind is accustomed to these deflating feelings and the sense of 'not getting it right' or something like that, but that's merely mental habits and there isn't any valid reason for it. There is no room for such feelings in meditation practice, so if one notices these counter-productive feelings,they would do well to cultivate patience and persistence in their place. These are the virtues that grow where disappointment and defeat dissipate.

To elaborate on the experience, there are pleasant and unpleasant experiences, and since meditation isn't pertinent to experiences per se, but to the stable self presence of the meditator, one cultivates a neutral balance of mind that is reflective of the central stillness of any one person's being. It doesn't matter if pain manifests in the body or if a flow of energy delights the senses, because if one can't meditate during a painful episode, and instead, is mentally unbalanced by their reactions to it, it reveals to the meditator that there is some work to do toward stablizing their balance of mind. In the case of pleasure the problems are more nuanced, but people tend to become desirous of pleasure, and are are unsettled when they don't get what they want, or they cling to it as opposed to letting it pass as it wont to do. In such a case, the person can also practice to enhance their stability and balance. This goes to say, that regardless the nature of the experience, all experience is an opportunity to cultivate the balance of one's mind.

I wish to explain why that is important. People are accustomed and habitualised to react with desire to pleasure and aversion to displeasure, and they don't always understand this kind of hatred and love is generated as mental reactivity that perpetuates egocentricity i.e. "I react". This illustrious figure, I, is completely constructed of the action/reaction process which drives the karmic wheel, produces the egomanic symptoms of me and my and mine, and perpetuates the very movement of mind that disturbs the meditator. It's the basis of suffering.

The body and mind are an interwoven fabric. The body manifests the contents of mind, and all of a persons emotional content is manifest in the sensual experience. If a person contains hard emotions from their past traumas or from self defeating beliefs, those emotions will manifest as hardened and painful sensual experiences, and they are toxic if held over the long term.

The reason they stay there for so long is that they are very unpleasant to endure, so people create an adverse reaction process. When that discomfort arises in their consciousness, they are compelled to engage an activity in order to avoid the feeling as it occurs, and persue a pleasurable feeling in order to distract themselves from it. This is the loop of aversion and desire or the duality of love/hate, and that process drives the continuation of the mind until all the stored thoughts and feelings finally complete their inevitable process (which we refer to as destiny, in a manner of speaking)

This brings me back to the cultivation of a neutral and stable balance of mind. This balance enables the unshakable presence of being to remain consistent. If one ceases the mental movement that I described above, and adopts a still disposition, the mental and emotional phenom manifest sensationally can be observed as they happen to be, and because the mind remains balanced, they can pass as freely as they are wont to do. Once they have completed their passage, they dissipate and are gone, and cease to recur (since the mental and emotional content no longer exists).

I must be coming to a conclusion. The thought that began about a half hour ago is now fading into an obscure mist; it came to me and went through a process of change that lasted for a while, and now it's fading fast.

Thanks

[Gem]

Here we go again

It would sound easy to say that nothing needs to be done, but it is quite difficult to do nothing.

People are like, How do I meditate? Methods are a plethora of individual preferences, and the only universal aspect of them all is awareness/observation and attention.

There are flaws in the principles behind many meditation methods in that they promise something wonderful that people can attain, and are based in the foundation of people's desires, so, where meditation is concerned, we deal in this moment, and promises (being futuristic) are fundamentally untruthful. The truth sounds something like, one must enter the water to know what getting wet is like.

Fundamental contentment and joy. This abides within everyone, and I think people are acutely instinctive to that fact, so it's not so much a matter of faith as it is primal knowledge. This can be expressed in various ways like 'my relationship with God' 'True Self' 'The Real' etc... but that rhetoric is like the lecture on the ocean, and is basically mute. Suffice to know that true happiness is within each person. That is NOT a promise for future happiness. It speaks of what is there now.

People ask, if 'it' is there, how come I'm unhappy? Tricky question. I don't know. I mean, it's your life right? So you tell me why and I'll simply believe you. All I can say is, in that 'you' are aware of the feeling, 'it' is there.

The question 'what is the purpose of meditation?' Again people express it like 'to commune with God' 'to attain Nirvana' and etc which is like the lesson on water to one who has never been wet. It only brings up desires like, me, I want that, I must have that... but why all the wanting if happiness is inside everyone right now?

Much sense in all that, if I may say so.

[jonesboy]

Because you have to quite the mind to understand the truth. Quieting the mind leads to daily happiness, it shrinks the stress gland in the brain and it leads to bliss.

Meditation teaches us to let go, not to hold onto desire. That is not to say desire is bad. Another word for desire is bhakti. It takes bhakti to continue to meditate, to learn and to grow as a person.

[Gem]

On it goes, rambling as it does, and to what end?

Earlier on I said, it's not for me to design your house, or I might say, create your temple... I only say that there's many ways to biuld a house, but the foundations must be solid, and like the Bible story explains, "Build your house upon the rock".

"And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock." Mathew 7-24

Unlike Mathew, I'm not here to say hear these words and do them, and I'm not going to give any instructions at all, because if you do what I say you merely imitate me and become a second hand human being. Krishnamurti once said:


"If I were foolish enough to give you a system and if you were foolish enough to follow it, you would merely be copying, imitating, conforming, accepting, and when you do that you have set up in yourself the authority of another and hence there is conflict between you and that authority. You feel you must do such and such a thing because you have been told to do it and yet you are incapable of doing it. You have your own particular inclinations, tendencies and pressures which conflict with the system you think you ought to follow and therefore there is a contradiction. So you will lead a double life between the ideology of the system and the actuality of your daily existence. In trying to conform to the ideology, you suppress yourself - whereas what is actually true is not the ideology but what you are. If you try to study yourself according to another you will always remain a second-hand human being." (source)

My sentiments exactly.

I speak of the primal presence of 'you'. The being that is, and the foundation of the house, Mathew's rock, is just that, so despite the practice at hand, the truth remains that continuation of your presence remains while all things are changing.

I come then to something Mooji said. ( I like the Indian formality in Mooji's case, so I say Moojiji .

"The true meaning of 'I' is joy. It is happiness. It is life... All the other things is just swimming by just like clouds in the sky. You don't want to hang on to any cloud because for how long will that last? Let them pass let them pass." (source)

'Let it pass'. All things will pass eventually; that's inevitable, and not always easy, but it's true. There is the one sense of being that remains present while all things pass, and "the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall".

[A human Being]

Lovely stuff, Gem Nothing further to add, really.

[Swami Chihuahuananda]

Lord , I was born a ramblin' man . I used to be insane , so all I listened to was the ramblings of an insane person . Doing that all day will freakin' drive a person CRAZY

One day my head exploded , or something , and I became a different person , and the insanity faded away (okay, I quit boozing and drugging , if you must know , and you must, because I say it all the time) . I'm still a ramblin' man , but it's not the kind of racket that it used to be . The mind does it's job , and helps me get on with the job of living . It never says anything all that important , since The Big Stuff doesn't really exist in the form of words , but it's useful enough in situations like this

Ramble on, sing my song ....

[Gem]

Thanks.

Does the rambling mind go back to what it already said, and reiterate it as an affirmation, ingraining it ever deeper into the substrate of the mind?

What is the drinker thinking of at 3:00pm, and why does this obsession and disatisfaction occur so uncontrollably? This reaches a place of full blown reliance and the addict cannot relax until they have the fix, but it won't last. The fix is just part of the cycle as the mind repeats the same rhetoric.

A person knows that they are strung out because of DTs, sweats, cramps or just an insane obsession that occurs in the mind. It has very little to do with the drug of choice and everything to do with 'your own' perpetual action/reaction habituality. Addicts are addicted to the mental loop which is so ingrained that one doesn't know how to live without it, and as such, to not partake of the substance, and thus break the vital link that completes the cycle, the person enters despair as their very identity is threatened by the loss of that thought pattern.

Any addict knows that the heights of with-drawl is a highly agitated state that can be coupled with a lot of irritability and bad temperament.

They say it's 'self medication' which suppresses deeper angst, but no, it's a part of the angst cycle in itself, The mind thinks it will somehow die, because in the absence of that thought cycle, the person will not exist as themselves, and after a few days when the withdrawl really sets in, 'I' begin to demand validation (but I call it 'satisfaction' or 'relief').

"I'm dying for a smoke".

The meditative mind will suffer the withdrawl, go through the emotion and endure the existential crisis, but it sees the sensations and obsessions as clouds that dissipate, sometimes the clouds come and then they disolve or blow away. There's no personal involvement with them. 'I' doesn't react to it all as it once did, and the thought loop, itself a cloud, it can dissipate, return, blow away, and recur... but that has nothing to do with me anymore.

[Mr Interesting]

Cheers Gem, I really found that all to be just what I needed simply because that's what meditation has become for me and I kinda thought I might be doing it wrong... but wasn't to bothered either way.

[LibbyScorp]

*thumbs up*