Meditations on the present moment

I would like to know if anyone has similar experiences as I have. I was recently observing my thoughts as they arised and went away, and how they invoked certain emotions. Upon any external stimuli, I could see almost a hundred thoughts quickly zip by in a manner of seconds until it either culminated into some sort of understanding or emotion. Into 30 minutes of my meditation, I asked myself “Who is this that is thinking and who is this that is observing?”, and then I felt a weird feeling that there were two kinds of consciousness levels within me.

After further meditation, the number of thoughts arising from external stimuli decreased, and the power of emotion was dimmed. I was able to do this by simply understanding that a particular thought was either insubstantial, useless, or just plain stupid. The world around me felt very different in a sense that I cannot describe. It was like this moment had such a prime importance and beauty that everything else that I thought was beautiful was in this moment. For some bizarre, yet blissful, reason I felt lighter, more energized, my visualization was sharpened to a degree that is impossible to achieve right now, and my thoughts were very quick. I am wondering if anyone here has any, or had, similar experiences.

Do you use a particular method of meditation? You might be interested in trying Roy Masters’ “Be Still and Know” meditation exercise. It can be downloaded for free.

fhu.com

There is also a “Be Still and Know” discussion board.

activeboard.com/forum.spark? … mID=227115

aimoo.com/forum/freeboard.cf … Caches=Yes

Within certain Indian[?] beliefs, what is watching the thoughts is the “soul”.

On the other hand, self-awareness is impossible if the physical brain is too busy “doing” something, thus nothing else can “watch” when the brain cannot watch itself.

I’m rather divided, as to the mystical vs the materialistic…

That’s strange, whenever I watch what I’m thinking I get “What am I thinking? What am I thinking? What am I thinking?”…

It does not require energy to deny an illusion, though it does take energy to maintain an illusion.
Even these words are temporary, they arose at random and they will be something else tomarrow.
Thus they do not exist; they are a temporary illusion.

Many souls build bodies for themselves, as a reaction to the random, changing and temporary outer forces,
thus the physical body is a reaction to random external force, but that body has a memory.

The memory is also temporary, and comes about by random changes in what they would call “reality”.
Thus a baby has never said at birth: “I want to be born, and to know the truth.”

When I asked myself, “why do I want to hurt myself?” – there was no answer other then habbit.
Habbit becomes the blind mental mechanics of adamance and “impossible people”.
I saw my body wanting to do, say and feel… For no real reason.

In the same way that a dog gives birth to another dog, an illusion gives birth to another illusion.
The sheer mass of the illusion, is not its merit, it is simply more illusion.

Your world and your body are the same thing. The body of another person is part of what you’d call the “outside world”.
This person that you call part of the outside world, calls you part of the outside world.
Without the “outside world” – you could not “live”, thus you are attached to it and are part of it.

Breaking an addiction to smoking would not be easy. It would be hard work, and it would require hard effort.
Breaking an addiction to illusion would be 100 times harder, thus rarely is it ever broken by anyone.
illusion is a deeper form of slavery and mundane repetition then tobaco.
The amount of strength needed in order to break the illusion, is the vast amount of strength that the illusion usedto take away from you.

Breaking my own chains was so difficult – that at night I wake up – and watch my body automatically build more chains around itself.
There has forever been what is wrong in human history, and the people who did the most wrong did not [at that time] have the ability to stop themselves from doing it, thus they were controlled and consumed by a force other then peace and balance. As peace and balance are not a force at all, those using force as a means can never force peace or balance into existence.

All too often habbit is put above balance, and the future of life is then destroyed.
For no real reason, there keeps on being the struggle with the world, for the sake of the self, and a struggling with self, for the sake of the world.
As both the self and the world came about at random, are changing, and are temporary, they do not really exist – and all they have to do is struggle towards the illusion of their own existence.

A man is willing to do almost anything to try to prove to himself that he is something, even if this often involves destroying himself, in part or in full.
As he tries to prove what cannot be proven, he adds to the illusion to make it appear more true.
For this reason, 5 men tell him: “You are strong”, and he believes it, whilst they say to his exact equal, [his brother] “You are pathetic”, and then his brother goes off feeling week and pathetic.

Both the strength and the weekness are illusion, which are persuaded by means of belief in forms and words… words that do not exist, and if spoken to someone who does not believe them, have no power. The word insights the body to belief, and once the body believes that the word is real, the body will do all it can to make that word real. The word was never real, as all real things do not have to be made real – they already are real. The word is more often the illusion, built upon an even larger illusion, as one says: “Reality is this.”

Not only are all men potentially capable of creating their own reality, but the universe does not stop them from believing any vast stretch of insanity about it.
Everyone has already created their own reality, as they react to words and forms. After they have built their reality, they say to their reality: “Reality is this.” though they have not created what always was.

The beliefs about what reality “is” are formed during childhood, and also, during the childhood, the child is most vulnerable, and the child will believe nearly any lie that is told to it.
If a child is abused, for the rest of that childs life, it will unconsciously feel as though certain useless & self-destructive things within it are “meant to be”.
Thus the blind man is told by abnother: “what I am seeing is real” – and he cannot help but believe.

If something was not even real in the fisrt place, then people would have to put forth allot of effort in order to make it “real”. Once they haev fully persuaded themselves, there is rarely anyone else who can persuade them of the opposite. Most persons devote their entire life to this sort of work, and they slave for what they believe in, or what they think is “real”.

Belief is the only means in which opinion has power. That power being given to it from where?
But if belief is temporary, is changing, and came about at random, not being able to exist on its own without a believer – is it “real”?
Perhaps belief is not real, and reality can easily exist without belief?
If all people on earth stopped believing in reality, then the reality that actually existed would still exist, whilst the belief no-longer existed.
Not having belief, is the only way to experience pure reality.

Tell me, how do you attain a state of no-belief?

Dan~,

I see you have built a very large philosophical system here. Let me gather the main points, as I see them, here:
• Things which “came about at random, are changing, and are temporary” are not real.
• Because of this, the body, the world, memory and words are only illusion.
• Illusion causes distancing from “peace and balance”.
• The goal of every human should be to free himself from illusion by freeing himself of belief to illusion.
You don’t mention what you consider to be real. I see two options:

  1. Things that did not come about at random, are not changing and are not temporary.
  2. Things that did not come about at random, are not changing or are not temporary.
    These are essentially the same, because if something does not change, it’s existance cannot change; that is, it cannot go from “exists” to “does not exist”. So, if something is capable of change, it must be temporary. If something is temporary, it must at some point have the quality “existance”, and at some other time, “inexistance”. Because this is cleary a change, it is apparent that if something is temporary, it is capable of change.
    Onwards. What does it mean for a thing to come about at random? How do you define random? If something is random, do you mean that there is no apparent reason for why it turned out how it did? I am inclined to think this way unless you show some other way of defining it.
    So, if something comes about at random, it comes into existance for some unclear reason, as opposed to a clear one. However, this still includes change, so something that comes about at random is capable of change, and thus temporary.

With this, I deduce what might be your definition of real:
A real thing is eternal and unchanging.
So, now I see that your world view (of course, I shouldn’t use the word “world”, since the world is, you say, only illusionary, but I believe you get what I mean) is very similar two Plato’s. There are, so to say, two worlds: one of eternal and unchanging things, and one of temporal and changing things.

Now, at one point, you say: “Souls build bodies for themselves as a reaction to the random.” This is very interesting, since it contains much about what your view about the soul is.

In which of the two worlds does the soul belong to - the real or the unreal world? Since the real things are eternal and unchanging, to be real, the soul needs to be eternal and unchanging. However, if souls create bodies as a reaction to the random, the soul cannot be unchanging, as it couldn’t go from “not yet reacted to the random” to “reacted to the random”. Because of this, the soul cannot be real.

So, to sum things up so far, I’ve worked out that:
• You believe in two worlds: the real world of eternal and unchanging, and the unreal world of temporary and changing.
• You belive that the soul is not real.
You go on to say indirectly that the unreal world is the world which we believe to exist, and that the real world really exists. Then you add that “belief is (…) not being able to exist on its own without a believer”. Since I’ve shown that the soul cannot exist in your system, either, and thus cannot be the believer, some element of the real world would have to be this believer. However, if it were, then it would be changing, going from “believing that right now is twenty-six minutes past six” to “believing that right now is twenty-seven minutes past six”. But if it changes, then it cannot be real, and thus doesn’t exist.

This leads us to a paradox: the illusion of the world cannot exist. What, then, is the thing I am observing right now?

EDIT: I just realized how much of a thread hijack this post was. Am quite sorry about that, valdas.

valdas,

It sounds as if you are finding the right place. Continue in your present course and don’t be concerned with ‘methodology’. At some point, the watcher appears and you will disappear. Don’t be frightened or concerned. Simply let go and become the watcher. There is no other explanation needed. Keep it simple and it will happen.

Dan,

Does it matter very much whether what you know is true or not? Think about it.

There are two men walking beside each other on the shores of a great beautiful sea. One is thinking of what beauty and truth is, and the other is watching the beautiful sea.

Valdas, yeah, I’ve had experiences that are very similar/the same as the one you described. It fits under the umbrella of “mystical experience,” at least, from a historical point of view. What is it really? I dunno. I think it’s the intuitive realization of the causality inherent in our own thinking, but the meditative state tends to produce blissful feelings as well. This is true of (almost) all meditative practices, which is why they’re so popular in religious and philosophical schools throughout the world. I think of it as a side effect of the neurochemical shift produced by meditation, but I don’t pretend to have the real answer. I’m trying to understand mysticism nowadays.

Apollo