Well Xeno here I am again, awash in the clear blue waters of your writing.
Hanging on to my question like a branch I grabbed as it floated by:
If indeed "you lose instead the pursuit of an unreal dream" how is it that you
still have what you call pesky delusions and residual delusional thinking?
Maybe the delusion is thinking they're delusions (-:
Am I being nit picky?
________________________________
From: Xenophaneros Anartaxius <anartax...@yahoo.com>
To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Saturday, March 9, 2013 3:19 PM
Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Meditation Hijacks Achievment? [was MUM kid
expelled for pot....]
--- 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.
