Wake-Up Sermon by Bodhidharma

[Rain95]

Originally Posted by running

making claims that desiring that is a problem is way off the rails and a real problem if people believe such non sense. nothing personal towards you or jonesboy if he believes such. but this is clearly really bad advice your giving in regards to desiring the objective as being a hindrance.

I think it's just a semantics or language problem. Like I can say I desire to have no desires. This is seeking something.

Some objectives are about egotism and not the "spirituality" they claim to be about. But then other objectives are clearly about self-realization.

This whole thing or dynamic involves the "self" doing the seeking as well. If that self is largely ego and thought based, the seeking will make ego and thought identification stronger. If the self doing the seeking has some experience with not identifying with thought and ego, the seeking can continue this unlinking from ego and conditioning.

So it's not really desire or seeking objectives is bad, it all depends on who or what is doing the seeking and what is being sought.

It's like you say, there are a lot of tools around, Buddhism, meditation, visualization, etc and it's not really the tools that are good or bad, or the seeking, it's the realization of the seeker that would make them about making ego bigger or getting rid of ego.

[Gem]

Originally Posted by running

there is no hindrance in aquiring more depth of the desired expereince. it is thre objective. not the hindrance. this thinking of desiring the what one is searching for as a hindrance is simply not true. yes during the process it may push it away by desiring it. but that is a very limited. if you think some how in my experince it is a hindrance you are mistaken. for one i am already that. so everything is always being quenched effortlessly. in your thinking i should stop where i am. in my thinking i will keep going. why not. i am still alive.

this is all philsophy your conjuring up. maybe good tools at times. but these are just tools. nothing more. nothing less. again this is not the worship. what quenches the desires and dissolves the pains effortlessly is the objective. silence and or bliss. doesn't matter. to go so far as making claims that desiring that is a problem is way off the rails and a real problem if people believe such non sense. nothing personal towards you or jonesboy if he believes such. but this is clearly really bad advice your giving in reguards to desiring the objective as being a hindrance. completely ignorant once you recognize intuition happens through feeling.

I'm more into the 'just watch' thing not because it's what I do, but because observation is what's actually going on already. Like the feeling in my hand is spontaneous, and I don't 'make it happen'. Maybe its a solidified feeling which has no flow, well OK, that's how it is. If I look into a hard, solidified painful sensation more carefully, I can see it's made of a billion tiny moving ripples. The reality of the experience changes from hard and painful to fluid and ephemeral because I perceive a more subtle level of realty as it is, and not because I do a meditation exercise that makes it as I want it to be.

[running]

Originally Posted by Gem

I'm more into the 'just watch' thing not because it's what I do, but because observation is what's actually going on already. Like the feeling in my hand is spontaneous, and I don't 'make it happen'. Maybe its a solidified feeling which has no flow, well OK, that's how it is. If I look into a hard, solidified painful sensation more carefully, I can see it's made of a billion tiny moving ripples. The reality of the experience changes from hard and painful to fluid and ephemeral because I perceive a more subtle level of realty as it is, and not because I do a meditation exercise that makes it as I want it to be.

whatever works for you is what matters imo. edit continued below.

just to be clear. just because following the bliss to further depths i think can work well for some. doesn't mean i haven't used and found benefit with many of the tactics you have mentioned.

[Gem]

Originally Posted by Rain95

All of that goes away at certain levels of realization in my experience. The type of "beauty" you are imagining there is a delusion that comes with body identification and cultural conditioning. In my experience, a lot of "human" experiences or ways of "seeing" things goes away in higher states of self-realization.

Really what self-realization is, is living from the perspective of what we are, and what we are is not this body.

It's a bit more like how beautiful things affect the felt sensations, like the sound of the waves on the beach soothe the body/mind, and we say the sound is 'so beautiful'. The well developed mind understands (without knowledge about it, just sees it is so) tha pleasing sensations are momentary, and craving, clinging etc. is futility.

[Rain95]

I don't like ocean wave noise. It can be amazingly loud.

[Imzadi]

Originally Posted by Rain95

I don't like ocean wave noise. It can be amazingly loud.

At times, I find the sound of the ocean's waves to be soothing and peaceful. It's not always loud. :)