Steve, What you describe below sounds very much like the Buddhist doctrine of annicca. In Vipassana meditation, the discomfort caused by sitting for prolonged periods of time gives us the insight that pain is not one 'block' of unchanging experience, but is arising/passing in a kind of continous 'flicker' (pretty much like a light bulb appears to be solid but isn't). Likewise, there is no solid reality called 'you' (or anything else, for that matter) for this to be happening to Is this something like what you mean by the below?
Mike ________________________________ From: SteveW <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wed, 6 April, 2011 5:12:21 Subject: [Zen] Re: Does Zen contain spirituality? --- In [email protected], "ED" <seacrofter001@...> wrote: > > > > Steve - > > I assert nothing with certainty. I try to understand what you Bill and > Mike and others are talking about. If I do say something you consider > incorrect, I would like to hear your alternative view-point. > > --ED > > Darn you, ED! And here I was trying to manipulate you into saying something >that would steer the topic to the subject of phenomenal > change and it's relationship to static Being (A topic of particular interest to philosophers!) WELL! If you won't allow yourself to manipulated for my egoistic gratification, then i shall have to plow on without you helpfully asking the right questions at the right time! IMO, phenomenal change is comprised of One-Thought-Moment snap-shots manifested by What Is trying to look at Itself. Each moment of perceived change is complete in itself, but we mentally string them together via memory into a series. This came to me in meditation as the realization that the mind-stream is actually discontinuous. Thoughts are just like sub-atomic particles. They appear and disappear, but they seem to be both particle-like or wave-like depending on how we attend to them. They also seem to conform to the Quantum Zeno effect. Focus on any particular thought and you can hold it within attention. Release single-point concentration and the thought smears into an indistinct streaming which is wave-like. The physicist Henry Stapp (I highly regard him!) thinks this might be an important factor in the operation of the attentional will. What do you think, based upon your meditational experience with both open-end witnessing and single-point concentration? Steve >
