Learning to fly

[snowyowl]

Starting my first post with a journal, then will start dipping into forum discussions. 

I want to use this, among other things, to journal about my meditation practice, other spiritual practice, and general discussion/monologue of ideas.

[snowyowl]

Meditation sitting practice: concentration (mindfulness of breathing) + resting in being (natural awareness) following Diana Winston. I plan to read The Mind Illuminated soon and maybe adjust my practice from there. I got it from archive.org on recommendation from folks in the forum here.  Plan: 30 mins per day incr to 60. Current actual: 20-30 mins but not every day. I must get more disciplined!  Start reading TMI in November. Timescale 2 months to end December.

Weight loss: BMI to come down to 20 and waist/height to 48%. Timescale 2 months to end December. This is a big challenge and tight timescale, as I've lost a lot of fitness due to the coronavirus lockdowns and working from home. My diet needs an urgent cleanup and Xmas is coming soon!

Learn some breathing exercises eg from Yoga to energise, cleanse etc. In fact I want to reboot a yoga practice but not setting any specific targets until January (got enough to deal with in the other 2 plans). 

[snowyowl]

@Shunyata hi, no I've not listened to any, is that what Shunyamurti calls it? It's just related to my username, I like owls

[snowyowl]

I'm currently reading (and practicing) The Mind Illuminated which is a practical resource for exploring these aspects of mind (checkout the First Interlude). He uses 'awareness' as a synonym for 'peripheral awareness', and 'attention' meaning 'focus', his theme is how to use both modes to best effect in our lives. "Mindfulness is the optimal interaction attention and peripheral awareness. "

My own addition to this is seeing awareness as unified being (unfragmented whole), and attention is when we focus on a part of the whole, so creating 'things', dividing reality up into foreground and background, object and environment. 

So I'm going "back" in a way, to beginners meditation while I work through the TMI book. Good for me really, as I have this image of being an advanced meditator lol. 

Also, as if that's not enough, I'm trying out the Headspace website, will journal about that too. 

Edited February 23, 2021 by snowyowl

[snowyowl]

"Everything" is a risky and mysterious word, in my view.

* It's got 2 meanings: everything-as-a-unified-whole, and the collection-of-all-individual-things. Which one is intended?

* "Everything" runs the risk of the paradox of self-reference. Eg a blanket statement like 'everything changes' includes the statement itself, so the law of change must itself change! . Whatever is true now must therefore become not true at some point in the future, if you take it totally literally. Including the conclusion I've just reached! How can this recurring paradox be resolved? I do love a good paradox!

* Change implies a reference to time. So we need to clarify our theory of time too.

I came across the belief in impermanence via Buddhism too. I've come to believe that a lot of religion is communicated in a kind of shorthand. Checking the sources, Buddhism doesn't say 'everything is impermanent', it says 'all conditioned phenomena are impermanent', ie those phenomena dependent on other phenomena through a causal relationship. You need to bring in time and cause-and-effect - big philosophical themes. The unconditioned may therefore not be impermanent, but what is the unconditioned? I'm still working on that, but I'd associate it with Nirvana, a state of mind unattached to individual things, but one with the whole, ie 'everything-as-a-unified-whole'.

[snowyowl]

I've been contemplating the self-reference paradox lately. You know, the one that says " This statement is false". It's like ideas of the Whole, Everything ( the Whole includes the idea about itself) vs the parts. It's a paradox from the pov of the subjective 'mind', separate from the objective 'world'. The loop of I is noticed when 'you' collapse this apparent separation and see it in contrast with the unity. 

'I' am a loop, me self-referencing. Mind trying to point to itself (using thought). I am the basic and commonplace everyday paradox, which I take for granted even though it's a logical impossibility. What it feels like to me is, not so much completing the loop, but unravelling it, by relaxing the thought process which created it. Not-doing, not doing. 

[snowyowl]

 

For a few minutes chilling ... 

 

 

[snowyowl]

We have this habit of trying to objectify everything. The physical world, externalised  to separate it from a subjective internal observer, in here. Our bodies also mapped as something external. Even our minds, egos, feelings are pushed outwards by the habit of this thought. So the spiritual practice of aware of awareness, or perceive the perceiver, is like a wonderful, hopeless game of call my bluff, taking this absurdity to the full logic of its position until it collapses the whole house of cards. The outside and inside, perceiver and perceived are one.

[snowyowl]

I've been contemplating this recently. The notion of 'me' is a self-reference from the outset, so we're on slippery ground. I try to find myself as an object of knowledge, but I am also the subject looking, within a subject-object paradigm. 

"There is no 'self' that resides inside you somewhere."   'Looking inside me' is like dissecting myself up to find myself, when I was here already. It's the reductionist mode of looking which hides the very soul I want to find. I'm wanting to re-integrate by cutting apart, no wonder it appears there's no-one there.

 

I used to be young and foolish too, wish I could've had this advice earlier: 

 

Edited March 3, 2021 by snowyowl

[snowyowl]

Working my way through TMI (The Mind Illuminated by John Yates / Culadasa). Just finished Step 2 Interrupted Attention and Overcoming Mind-Wandering. I am gaining new insights about awareness - mentioned above about the attention / peripheral awareness distinction (cf Diana Winston's 3 types of awareness: focussed, choiceless and natural awareness). 

In meditation I'm exploring the concentration style of mindfulness of breathing. Sensations are always present, in the sense that the feelings involved in breathing are always there, even when I'm asleep but I'm not always conscious of them. Even when I am conscious of something like a breath, a sound, or the feeling of sitting on the cushion, it moves between foreground and background (focus and periphery). It could be that conscious awareness is like a kind of torch shining light on what is otherwise unconscious. 

Breathing is a quiet sort of sensation, not as bright as some others like thoughts which come crashing in from the subconscious and take over like a loud noise or bright light in my mind which outshines my awareness of breathing until it runs out of energy. Then the quieter background is once more visible. This is telling me something good about how awareness and consciousness works, but I'm only seeing it indistinctly at the moment, I need more time observing.

[snowyowl]

My perspective: we don't create reality out of nothing (ex nihilo), but we reify it, ie we create things (in thought) out of the undifferentiated ground of being. This ground of being isn't nothing imo, but all I can say is, prior to us observing it, it's a mystery. The metaphorical tree falling over with nobody to see or hear it. Who decides what are the boundaries between the thing and it's environment? Thought does. In that sense, a 'tree' is my creation, but I still hold onto a primordial mystery prior to me creating the tree. 

Does that make sense? 

Ajahn Chah quote: 

“Do not try to become anything. Do not make yourself into anything. Do not be a meditator. Do not become enlightened. When you sit, let it be. When you walk, let it be. Grasp at nothing. Resist nothing.”

Edited March 25, 2021 by snowyowl