That post made it completely worth the time it took for me to write my own to
serve as your writing prompt. Fascinating, thoughtful post. I'll read it a
few times, but thanks for such an honest description of your own relationship
with meditation and different states of consciousness.
Your post was FFL at its best!
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Xenophaneros Anartaxius"
<anartaxius@...> wrote:
>
> --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "curtisdeltablues" <curtisdeltablues@>
> wrote:
> > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "emilymae.reyn" <emilymae.reyn@>
> > wrote:
> > >
> > > Does meditation work to balance out the chemical makeup of one's
> > > physiology? Does it release our natural feel good chemicals within the
> > > body? Or, maintain balanced levels of serotonin, dopamine, etc.
> >
> > My experience with TM meditation and its associated practices is that it is
> > a way to hijack our usual brain reward system for achievement in our lives.
> > And this was Maharishi's stated goal, fulfillment divorced from
> > achievement. If you keep mediating you cultivate the mind to trigger
> > highly pleasurable states. It becomes very addictive. Many meditators
> > show signs of extreme irritation if they miss a mediation once they get
> > hooked on it just like any other addict. So IMO mediation can become a
> > problem like any other form of hijacking the pleasure states, meant to
> > reward our species for doing things that promote our survival or express
> > our creativity. I believe there is no neuronal free lunch, every pleasure
> > state has a cost.
> >
> > Of course this is a highly heretical view in circles where regular
> > meditation and more meditation are both seen as only positives. But for me
> > the balance is trickier. I use meditation when I need some of what it does
> > for my brain, but regular meditation just leads to me getting hooked on the
> > mental states it produces. And for me these states do not produce my
> > optimum functioning.
> >
> > They are as advertized, very charming to our minds. But they can easily
> > lead to an end in themselves since our brains are inherently lazy and
> > getting the quick reward is neurologically preferred. Unfortunately that
> > does not lead to my fullest creative potential any more than hitting the
> > slot lever again and again. Although they say that meditation is a
> > preparation for activity, and I don't doubt that for really impulsive
> > people it is a real benefit, for people like me who have perhaps cultivated
> > this functioning a bit too much, it can become a real distraction. I get a
> > lot more done with my eyes opened!
> >
> > This understanding is still just a work in progress. I am fascinated that
> > some like Barry maintain that other forms of meditation do no exhibit some
> > of what I see as downsides of TM's passive bliss states style.
> >
> Curtis,
>
> I found this little post really interesting. While I found TM blissful to
> some extent, and the tendency to want to be regular on that basis, there was
> always in the 'back of my mind' a remembrance of the experiences that led me
> into meditation, which were, for want of a better way to say it,
> 'mini-awakenings', brief flashes of insight. The memory of these experiences
> acted as a kind of mental rudder in what developed subsequently in experience.
>
> After about a half-decade of meditation an experience similar to the
> description of CC developed. One day it vanished. I did not even realise it
> had vanished. Several months went by, and one morning I awoke and realised
> that the inner silence was completely absent. The witnessing was just gone.
> Now I continued to meditate, but that experience never returned; something
> like it developed, almost like a ghost, a sense that whatever meditation was
> doing, it was not localised as a still awareness inside.
>
> Also during this period, which lasted a long time, my attention, which for
> most of my previous life had been pretty inner directed - not because I was
> spiritual, but because I liked to think about things and lived in my head a
> lot - pretty much went to things outside, girls, food, movies. There were
> certain kinds of spiritual yearnings, what I think were the remains of early
> religious programming, and these became rather diffused over time. Sometime
> before 1990, those yearnings came to an end: they just stopped dead.
>
> I continued to meditate, all the while grumbling about it not working out.
> That CC experience had been very intriguing, a sense of interior
> invulnerability walled off from the world, and being identified with it
> rather than the ego, which nonetheless continued to seem to be real as a
> sense of a separate entity.
>
> By the mid 1990s my ties to the movement pretty much ended; I seem to have
> survived primarily on luck. During this whole period after the first five
> years of meditation, I did not round much, and even if I had the opportunity,
> I did not always take it up.
>
> By the mid-2000s something odd happened, life seemed, psychologically, to be
> easier. I was unemployed at the time, it just seemed I was lucky. I am not
> saying here I was somehow in accord with the laws of nature and they were
> supporting me. It was more just dumb luck.
>
> There was also a sign of some shift in meditation, the tendency to not want
> to pick up the mantra, but just to sit quietly.
>
> After a couple of years, I developed a strange unrest - I kept remembering an
> event from the early 1970s, over and over, day after day. It went on for a
> couple of weeks and then I remembered a phrase from a book I had read on Zen
> about that time; I looked it up on the Internet, found an essay which I read,
> and then concluded on the basis of no insight or understanding whatsoever,
> that this had something to do with my unrest.
>
> A half month later, this unrest broke, I was outside walking, and suddenly it
> was as if a veil had lifted. It was stunning. My experience suddenly became
> just as it was before I started meditation; before I had any spiritual
> experience whatsoever. The corollary to this experience developed over time:
> What I had thought all that meditation was leading to was just imagination.
> Ordinary everyday experience, which for the most part I had had every day of
> my life, was it. This was what 'absolute being' was, just what has always
> been going on. No hyped up 'states of consciousness', just ordinary life. The
> really interesting thing is it is fulfilling, because all the imaginary
> expectations were gone, kaput, unreal. What a trip. You do not gain a thing
> from this, you lose instead the pursuit of an unreal dream. This was
> basically the same quality of experience I had had in the years before TM,
> but vastly clearer.
>
> All this did seem to correlate with practicing TM. As the years have passed
> since that realisation, the tendency to just sit still in meditation rather
> than use the mantra has increased dramatically, because my experience now is,
> there is hardly any inner value of life; the field of experience
> ('consciousness and the content') is integral and it is impossible to think
> of there being anything more and take it seriously. I still meditate quite a
> lot, but not on a fixed schedule, and just how I meditate depends on how I
> feel. TM seems to work better when I am fatigued in some way, and a Zen type
> of meditation seems to work better when I am fresh, but in neither case do I
> meditate because I want to be blissful; that does not mean anything anymore.
> In the early years of the movement M would say that if something worked in
> this spiritual sense, it had to be TM, in other words he spoke of TM as a
> general principle rather than as a specific methodology.
>
> Some additional comments. A moment of realisation is brief, it is the
> implications that settle in subsequently that are really transforming,
> learning how to live without the dreamy fantasies of previous life. It really
> makes no sense to say there is an empirical world and a world beyond that.
> The empirical world is the 'transcendent' one sought; there is no difference
> between consciousness and its content. Psychologically the day to day
> experience is variable, but at the same time it's all rock steady -
> experientially this is not paradoxical, though separating it out in the
> intellect is. But then one does not take one's thoughts with any of the
> gravity that one did before. Life goes on, and one's commentary on it is like
> a novel, a fictitious story, that from time to time has some value in
> grasping the nature of what it going on.
>
> It is the residual delusional thinking that I am working on now. For me, like
> many others, waking up is not usually a clean sweep, there is still clutter
> here and there, but as time goes on it gets harder and harder to sweep these
> pesky delusions under the rug. But the main thing is I do not gravitate to
> bliss or away from it. If things are pleasant, this feels 'better', but if it
> is not, that is what is going on, and one lives it; any resistance makes it
> worse. Nonetheless, if I were in a burning building, do not expect me to stay
> within and get char-broiled. Common sense is the rule.
>
> In all these years I have found three kinds of meditation useful:
>
> 1. Guided Meditations
> 2. TM
> 3. Zen, Vipassana, mindfulness kinds of meditation where instead of a mantra,
> one comes back to the breath if one drifts off, and attempting to be as
> physically still as possible (with minimal effort). I could not do this kind
> of meditation four or five decades ago, but now is more or less the pervasive
> quality of most of my meditations, even if I start with TM.
>
> If everything is 'transcendence', one cannot meditate to transcend, one
> meditates because among other things, it is something to do or not do.
> Meditation is really culturing not doing anything, that mysterious quality of
> letting the world get it on and having a ball.
>
> As for creativity, I feel meditation and the release of various impediments
> allows it to flow better; I have never felt meditation enhances creativity.
> Whatever creativity we have is already there. Believing strongly that
> meditation enhances creativity seems to be a good way to banish creativity
> from experience and replace it with a veneer of creativity platitudes.
> Creativity just comes if it is there and there is no resistence. There are
> people in this world who really do lack creativity. Unblocking that results
> in the same lack of creativity. I often think these people gravitate to
> bureaucratic jobs. MUM administration comes to mind.
>
> Experiment. Be curious. Think. You cannot learn about your own life by
> sitting back and letting someone else tell you how to live it. Make use of
> advice, but do not get sucked into it. Do not believe a word I say.
>
