Carl-Richard

💯

I will watch.

Tl;dr ples

Forming the intention to sit in meditation, focus on an object and let go of distractions, is arguably just as deep as forming the intention to dissolve the distractions themselves. But even if it is deeper, again, teachings, practices, are like going to war. You are already making a huge mess. But that's ok. Because you are constantly making a mess. You're just creating a direction in that mess. The difference between spirituality and normal life, meditation and non-meditation, is simply an intention and a direction. Nothing feeds the ego more than forming the intention itself, spirituality itself. And if you don't address that, i.e. letting go of the search itself, you will easily go in circles. You can pretend like you don't need to address it, but then it will either be addressed on accident, in the form of a spontaneous insight "oh yeah of course", or it will stay unconscious and you will ponder why the hell you're stuck after these thousands of hours of meditating.

When you've attained the ability to sit in meditation for an extended period of time, which might require a certain degree of deconstruction for you to get there without excessive inner turmoil, it becomes clear that meditation is not just a behavioral process of sitting down and following a certain directive or technique, but in fact also an energetic process. What is this energy and what is the process? To get a sense of what the energy "is", you can try a technique like third eye meditation. You "stare" with your inner eye on a point between and slightly above your eyebrows, ideally after holding your finger close to the skin such that you create a tingling sensation. Then you "stare" at this tingling sensation and make it grow. And you might notice the sensation will spread across your forehead, and also that other sensations in your body seem to behave in the same way or even add to the sensation. This is one way to identify the type of energy we're talking about, which is a subtle form of energy which constantly travels through your body and which you can become more perceptive to with practice. To get a clearer sense of the energetic "process" (the dynamic aspect of the energy, how it travels, how it moves), you can try a technique coined by Martin Ball as "fractal energetic yoga" (20:05 for illustration). You sit or stand in a room with quite a bit of free space (or outside, but ideally on a comfortable surface) and make sure your limbs and fingers and generally your entire body are bilaterally symmetrical (your left side mirrors your right side). Then you simply sit or stand still in bilateral symmetry for a while, and then you try to move while keeping bilateral symmetry. Then try to notice how moving in a certain way is more natural or more flowy than others, where you feel a natural groove that you can tap into. If you do this enough, you might notice yourself moving spontaneously outside your will. That is when you're inhabiting the natural energetic process, the innate dynamic flow of energy that your body produces. When you have identified the energy, what it is, and how it moves, you can start to do this in your sitting meditation. As you sit there, try to notice this subtle energy and its natural flow that is going through your body. As you become more and more relaxed, as you release tensions in your body, see how the energy is executing these actions, see how it makes you move in these subtle subtle ways. Allow it to do this, observe how it's best allowed to flow. See where the energy is headed. Naturally, it's heading for your head. When you feel the energy accumulating in your head (specifically your forehead), and you feel the connection between the flow in the rest of your body and your head, strengthen that connection. Let your head become a transmission tower for your innate energy. As you transmit and release this energy, you will feel lighter, more fluid, more present. And as you continue, also in tandem with whatever meditation techniques you use, your meditation becomes deeper. So this is meditation as unwinding of energy, of emptying out and riding the natural waves of your energy. And over time, you might notice tapping into this natural flow while going about your life, in your movements, or even in your thought. This is when you start embodying or channeling the will of God. When this will becomes too strong to resist, you are now Enlightened.

How does focused attention meditation work? You focus, you get distracted, you notice the distraction, you break the distraction. What does breaking the distraction entail? It entails letting go of the injuction of the distraction. So focused attention meditation has deconstruction built into it. It's just the object of attention serves as an anchor and facilitator of the deconstruction. But it's also possible to address the deconstruction process more directly, by addressing the distractions themselves. What is driving the distractions? Are you holding on to some notions, ideas, beliefs, that make the distractions arise in the first place? What if you can let go of those notions, ideas, beliefs? Will the distractions keep occurring or will they disappear?

I awoke on an airplane while listening to Martin Ball's electronic music and breathing deeply and lovingly with my spine extremely erect, focusing intensely and lovingly on the music. The lyrics mouthed "surrender to the flow", and a few moments later, my mind shouted internally "oh shit oh shit you're dying! Do something!". I open my eyes and reach out to drink from my water bottle. My hand literally travels from my seat to the water bottle with ZERO feeling of me controlling the arm, ZERO feeling of weight, ZERO feeling of having moved by my own will. That is when I realized oh fuck this is it. I immediately turn my head to the right to look out the window and the airplane lands, and I feel like I'm at home in my old house from when I was 3 years old or younger sitting in my living room, safe, comfortable, at peace. Tears boil up, but I force them down. People are standing up and getting ready to leave. I stand up and look behind me. I see every single person, every single face, sitting there in one single space, all at once, no focus, just wide focal view. And as I walk off the plane, I'm not walking. I'm levitating. Someone else is moving my feet and it's not me. And tears come, but I press them down again. My eyes meet a child in a stroller, they catch my eyes, they keep looking, even as they pass by, they keep looking, they turn around to look behind to keep looking. What did they see? Did they see what I had seen? That worked.

I have a cold virus and I'm cranky >:) Sorry. Sorry, got you mixed up with the other person in the thread saying that. My bad. Lol. Quote Paramahansa Yogananda "you people do not know how to sleep, you pull with you all sorts of images and personal drama". How to get it to work ≠ only way to get it to work. You can awaken/meditate spontaneously without doing anything. That also works. Or staring at your own navel.

Yeah, never let go of any of your attachments. That's a good way to get stuck looping on a forum for the rest of your life.

Nowhere in history was there one single "traditional" meditation. And dynamic forms of meditation have existed since forever. ? ? In your little meta one-up game, I responded by saying that all of that was deconstruction. Letting go is deconstruction. It doesn't matter whether you're letting go of "letting go". Obviously, that is still letting go. I don't know what you're going on about. You've said things I've never said three times now.

You sound like a literal Blue religious person.

Sitting meditation, walking meditation, music meditation, chanting meditation, mantra meditation, kundalini meditation, third eye meditation, vipassana meditation, focused attention meditation, open-awareness meditation, TM meditation, ACEM meditation, compassion meditation, devotion meditation. Just on the top of my head late at night while having a cold virus. Let's also quote directly from all the religious traditions, Eastern and Western. Let's quote Sadhguru. Let's quote all the online non-duality teachers. Let's see how many meditations we can find. Then let's try to claim that meditation is one specific thing and that doing so has any meaning outside being dogmatic about your highly personal interpretation of a word that describes practices that have worked for you in your own life.

Meditation is a billion things. Maybe in your New Age framework, it's one very specific thing.

Take all the health you can get while doing fantastic shit.

Simple is not easy as they say.

Using the word "ontologically" makes it seem like a deep thing, but it's really just me. What I see, what I feel, what I sense, is just me. It is made out of me. We call it "consciousness" when we want to contrast it to some notions of materialism. But we don't need to call it much. Going beyond the ontological ground, operationalizing it, that is what I've done here.

It's all deconstruction. That's not a meta game.

Let me clarify for the thread in general that this energy I'm referring to is not something exotic and "other" that you have to discover like some hidden dimension or realm. It's identical to your body. It's just that it requires approaching it with your attention like a microscope, to try to see the very smallest and finest details. Like there are microorganisms in your body, there are micro-movements and micro-physiological events in your body that you can become aware of. Your awareness of these phenomena is what the energy is. Really everything in your body, even the most gross and obvious movements, like lifting your arm, is this energy. I'm just talking about the subtler and finer detail movements.

Interesting. I guess it underscores the fact that realizing formlessness does not necessarily depend on anything happening in form, such as knowledge or sensitivity of energy phenomena.

Ok so you agree that there is a progression from tension to relaxation (unwinding of energy) in the body and that this occurs in different parts of the body. You just don't feel it around your head area or that there is energy moving towards it. Do you experience the "transmutation" I described with sexual energy (it increasing mental clarity when not released)? That was not what I was doing, but I agree it's mostly a futile exercise to judge awakening through questioning.

Now you're just being a smartass.

Again, letting go of letting go. You see the trick that is being played? It's letting go all the way down.

Some kinds of music play on innovation and surprise, while other play on refining and maximizing specific well-established qualities. For example, Freddie Mercury's voice, while mostly expressed in a "classic" rock format, absolutely blows the quality of "rock vocals" out of the water. Progressive rock for me is somewhere in the middle. You have the deep loyalty and precise refining of the rock format but also elements of innovation. And that produces a very unique balance of refinement and familiarity sprinkled in with surprise and idiosyncrasy. Someone like Gentle Giant is arguably an example of pushing more strongly in the direction of innovation. But this all kinda depends on the time horizon you're viewing it from. Because you can also take progressive rock as its own format and refine that again, which is arguably what someone like Steven Wilson has done (he is not coincidentally a renowned audio engineer, so much so that he has gotten to remix the old music of bands like Yes and Jethro Tull).

They say that good music keeps you at the edge between familiarity and surprise. Too familiar becomes boring, and too surprising becomes hard to follow. Musical improvisation is the manifestation of this in real time, and you can usually notice when the player is engaging in well-established/familiar patterns ("licks") and when the player is creating something completely original. I'm used to improvising a lot on guitar, and I've noticed that I'm able to imagine impossibly intricate and original lines of improvisation in my head, but I'm in no way technically advanced enough to manifest that through my instrument. When I listen to the most complete virtuostic improvisational players out there, even though they can come very close many times, I always feel a tension between boredom and impenetrability. Of course, this desire I have of hearing the most hyper-creative lines of notes that I can possibly imagine is impossible to fulfill. It's completely relative to my unique conception of music, and I would probably never in a million years get to hear somebody produce even 10 seconds of those exact notes (which would be absolutely transcendentally orgasmic if it happened). Nevertheless, I know two players who come extremely close, and I'll try to weigh to which extent they're too "boring" ("musically conventional" is a better word) or too impenetrable (too melodically or harmonically complex) relative to my impossible standard of imaginative perfection. Guthrie Govan (obviously). It's tricky, because he is so versatile that he often fluctuates between too conventional (like bluesy bendy stuff) and too complex (like jazzy shredding stuff). I'll give an example for each player: Allan Holdsworth is notoriously known for being impossible to imitate by other players. For reference, Guthrie Govan can imitate virtually anyone but him. He often becomes too complex. I sometimes have to listen to his songs 30 times to understand what he is doing (like the run at 1:28 in the video below). (Btw things become more interesting around 0:40).

Does it load now? 3:45 is when the monstrocity of a riff starts (and again, the one after at 4:16 too is a monstrocity). The time starts a bit before where you get the buildup leading to it. I couldn't let that one slide 😤