For me, certain visual or auditory experiences came and went before strong witnessing developed, which then went away for about three decades, buy then eventually returned in a new guise and a new understanding and that was stable for a few years and then became unstable again without being completely lost, and then returned again with what so far seems much more stability. This new witnessing though does not follow the 'screen of consciousness' model we find described in CC because it is not sensed as a separate process looking on experience. It is just experience in total.
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <salyavin808@...> wrote: Yes, I used to get a lot of things like that. A text book progression of enlightened states as espoused by Marshy. Really amazingly nice and it convinced me I was going to get there but it all stopped, maybe it will start up again but I doubt it and it doesn't even interest me any more, it's like the acid trips I used to do, a great way to spend a day but is it a good long term proposition? At work once I became the unwitting centre of attention when I slipped into "unity" on a busy friday afternoon when we were normally running around trying to wrap everything up. Everyone else just pulled up a chair and sat round my desk, it was amazing how different yet the same I was, intensely relaxed but wide awake and flowing all things good from some centre that wasn't even me but was everything that existed and it was all lush, powerful and vivid. Happy days, but it wore off a few hours later and that was that. What it all means I cannot say, my guess is nothing, just a phase, maybe all that bending my mind out of shape suddenly reflexively threw it into a euphoric state. But whatever, it doesn't work any more... --In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <steve.sundur@...> wrote: Wow, I hope you don't me saying this, but this is the nicest post we've had in about six months. And it sounds like more than witnessing. I say that because as I've always understood it, the transcendental field is without attributes. It is when we experience it that it becomes blissful. But otherwise, it is just a silent witness. Whatever you were experiencing was creeping into waking state. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote: Yes, like being wrapped in infinite cotton wool, all rosy and warm. During some of those experiences I'd spend days seeing the world like it's made of christmas tree lights with that angel hair round them. Then it got even better and I saw where the light came from and I knew everything without being able to answer any questions and then it stopped. What the point of it was, other than to make me feel my ascetic life was paying off, is beyond me. But if it had lasted any longer I probably would have started a cult myself. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <steve.sundur@...> wrote: (-: Hey, neat about that witnessing experience. I experienced it once, and didn't realize it till after the fact. But was the experience "blissful" for you? ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <no_re...@yahoogroups.com> wrote: Potayto, potahto. ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <dhamiltony2k5@...> wrote: No, most of what you are offering as definition technically is about sects. Cults form around charismatic persons. Sects form out of specialness, exception or differentiation as in different denominations of protestantism or catholicism or denominations or types of meditation. Those are sects. Sects are around fragmentation and cults are around persons as charismatics. For instance, If someone really 'charismatic', like earlier defined by Weber, like a Robin were to show up in Fairfield, Iowa and take off a bunch of meditators as his followers by force and power of personality then we're talking cult, as a sect. That is different than the different sects of people out teaching meditations and some others out there teaching other things they've learned. -Buck in the Dome Salyavin808 writes: You don't need any leader to be a cult. All you need is a belief system that sets you apart from the norm.
