--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, wrote: > > Couple of "experiences" to relate, triggered by what you posted here. > > I remember in my teaching days that occasionally someone would comment how uncomfortable it was to just melt into the transcendence. Maybe they didn't use that exact phrase, but it was something along those lines and "losing one self". Well, I am not a regular mediator, but when I do meditate it is TM, and recently I had a deep experience of transcendence, and yes, it was uncomfortable in just the way that those people would describe. Kinda strange, isn't it. Is that the onset of old age. (-: > > Experience #2. Lately I've have some issues with a tenant in a building we are trying to renovate. I like him, but there have been constant disagreements. It's dawned on me that he is probably bi-polar. It's taken a lot of mental energy to deal with it. When I get in situations like that, I don't turn the radio on in the car, so I can work on the problem in my head without a lot of distractions. And I've noticed how much more aware I am of my own thoughts and the things around me as I drive without listening to the radio. > > Now tell me, doesn't that just blow your socks off. (-:
It loosened them somewhat, which is pretty good considering they are stretchy athletic socks, because I just came in from a short run. :-) I would suggest that experience #2 is related to experience #1. People get so used to "where they live" -- be it in their heads (their idea of self) or in their houses (their idea of 'home') -- that anything that separates them from all of this familiarity is seen as disruptive or threatening. It's one thing to *talk* about "selflessness," but quite another to have the self just friggin' *go away*. For the same reason that many people *can't* be in the car without a radio playing to distract them and keep things feeling "normal," many people can't conceive of being without the fiction of the being a self. My bet is that if science came up with a safe, no-side-effects pill that would provide the experience of No-Self, very few on this forum would take it. They would pay big bucks for some pill that would enable the self they cling to to fly, or turn invisible, or read minds, or stuff like that, but all of those things are "safe" because it's still the SOS (same old self) doing them. But being *without* that self, and actually being without a self, period? That's perceived as scary by most people, even the ones who have been touting the goal of "selflessness" for decades. > ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, turquoiseb@ wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, wrote: > > > > Re this Chuang-tzu quote: "A monk fell asleep and dreamed he was a butterfly. When he awoke, he asked himself "Was I a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming I am a man"? > > > > Chuang-tzu's point was NOT to imply that all experience is dream-like (it isn't); Chuang-tzu's point was NOT to suggest that he could really be a butterfly (he wasn't one)! What Chuang-tzu was getting at is that our everyday sense of self - "I am a man - a father - a doctor - an American" - is just the social role we've been conditioned to accept. It's our sense of identity he's attacking. It's that false sense of a permanent ID in the ever-changing flow of the Tao that is our "hang-up". > > Although part of me chafes at the very notion of someone -- anyone -- saying "What such-and-such sage meant..." (we don't know, and never will), your *interpretation* of what he meant strikes a resonance with me. > > The phrase I like the most is "that false sense of a permanent ID," with the emphasis on the word "permanent." > > Whatever the fuck was going on around the Rama guy I spent time with, one of the benefits *of* being around him was that the energy field was so powerful and so transformative that you really *couldn't* hold on to any fixed version of self to identify with. One desert trip blew you out of your socks and out of your self, for at least a week. You tried to come home and identify with the things and roles you had identified with before, and it just didn't work. You weren't that self any more. > > Better, for that week you weren't really *any* self, fixed or otherwise. You were a churning flux of selves, all of them fleeting, all transitory. I came to really like it. Even if some future shrink figures out what was happening to the hundreds of people who experienced this and writes it off to whatever term he invents for explaining that phenomenon, I prefer to continue thinking of it as unexplainable. > > If you ever did LSD back in the day -- *good* acid, not that street shit that appeared after 1967 -- you may remember a similar feeling in the days after a powerful trip. 125 micrograms of Sandoz LSD would blow you out of any fixed self for 6-8 hours, but the really interesting thing was that for some *days* afterwards you had some difficulty "getting back to" the self you thought you were before the trip. > > Being around the Rama guy was like that, without the drugs. It was just the damnedest thing, and probably *not* to everyone's taste. I mean, if you're really *attached* to your notion of self and Who You Think You Are, you're probably not going to be attracted to either LSD or an experience in the desert that proves to you that you don't *have* a self. But some of us are weird, and kinda liked it. I called it Surfing The Tao. :-) > > Try to imagine the alternative. Being so enamored of the notion of "permanent self" that you become attached to it, and fear your imagined self ever going away. If you are attached to it enough, you might actually "intend" that permanence into happening. And then what? You're stuck with one puny self for the rest of your life. No surprises, no changes. Always seeing the world around you the way you see it now. That's my idea of Hell. >
