Meditation MEGATHREAD

[dutch 68]

It is great to see how everybody here is getting closer and personal trusting each other sharing their feelings and experiences on an internet forum.

 

Janie you are fine, was not trying to tell you anything other than you are allready fine and intouch with the vibrations of meditation.

 

Richard gets very stressed, philosophical and angry when people are not religious like him. He talks about meditation but is not really in touch with it as an real experience yet.

He will receive meditation when it gets less deep and less complicated and he stops fighting and arguing over it.

 

Lots of other great people present here now on this forum, loving every bit of it!

[PaliRichard 10]

dutch

 

Had you actually understood any of the posts I have made you would realize I have been encouraging people not to be religious like me.

 

The only posts I have made about religion are when I have been speaking from the Buddhist perspective and correcting people on their misunderstanding of Buddhism.

 

I really wish you could realize that because had you done so our conversations could have been much more fruitful.

[janie48 95]

It is great to see how everybody here is getting closer and personal trusting each other sharing their feelings and experiences on an internet forum.

 

Janie you are fine, was not trying to tell you anything other than you are allready fine and intouch with the vibrations of meditation.

 

Richard gets very stressed, philosophical and angry when people are not religious like him. He talks about meditation but is not really in touch with it as an real experience yet.

He will receive meditation when it gets less deep and less complicated and he stops fighting and arguing over it.

 

Lots of other great people present here now on this forum, loving every bit of it!

 

dutch i agree with most of your comments,but please lets not get personal. i really have to disagree with you about Richard.

I have shared another thread with him,where he made it clear he was an atheist.

I have debated on threads with many atheists,Richard and Phanerothyne are two of the most moderate thinking ones i have come across,and both have always struck me as being very nice.

Anyway we really should not be remarking about others,on the thread its not right, i suggest whatever issues you have with him,if possible you discuss them in private.

You could always go in the chat room.

Edited March 14, 2012 by janie48

[dutch 68]

I have no issues with richard janie. He is a lovely guy. I realize he is struggling to encourage and correct people of misunderstandings.

His posts are long and many full of the words stress, philosophy, knowledge, understanding, claiming it and complicated explainations of something that is so simple.

His knowledge of meditation has not yet brought him to the experience of it yet.

That is fine, he shall be a fantastic preacher untill one day he will become a buddha himself there is no hurry.

I apreciate his prescence here he does not have to change for me or like or dislike me.

[PaliRichard 10]

dutch i agree with most of your comments,but please lets not get personal. i really have to disagree with you about Richard.

I have shared another thread with him,where he made it clear he was an atheist.

I have debated on threads with many atheists,Richard and Phanerothyne are two of the most moderate thinking ones i have come across,and both have always struck me as being very nice.

 

That is very kind of you to say Janie, and it is most appreciated.

Edited March 14, 2012 by PaliRichard

[dutch 68]

A preacher needs followers.

 

A meditator stands on his own two feet.

[PaliRichard 10]

Not explain it, describe.

 

Arg! Stop it! Or at least qualify your similes in more detail.

 

How would you explain blue to a sighted person, out of interest?[/Quote]

 

That would require philosophy too, but would be possible, because the sighted person will have experience of colours, you could say for example 'It's more like green than red', this although not giving them an exact representation would give them an 'idea', hence the poetry/simile etc that you object to in describing meditation. You can't describe the thing exactly, but if you can relate it to something familiar to the person asking they can get an 'impression'.

 

But you can't do that with the experience itself, it can't be described, just like blue can't be alluded to in any way to someone who has never seen any colour.

 

The "philosophy" of the experience is not really what I am interested in. People coming from different contexts, will have different philosophies. I'm interested in whether these people have similar or wildly different peak experiences[/Quote]

 

But as I've put before on here (not sure if it was directly to you) meditation itself is simple, it is those very philosophies that dictate its direction, some people seek oneness with the universe, some seek unbinding from the fetters of suffering, some merely want a calmer mind, the 'process' of meditation is the same mechanically for all three, but the experience will vary wildly depending on the philosophy used as a tool alongside the simple meditation.

 

I gravitated to this thread with its Buddhists and Taoists because what I've read and heard and managed to distinguish from the tangle of theology and frankly weird ideas, does resonate with my experiences, but not just of meditation[/Quote]

 

I put a post about this (ish) earlier. May I ask you a question? What experiences have you had that resonate with what you think about Buddhism and Taoism?

 

I think these states can strike you without years of training and discipline, in an instant[/Quote]

 

I don't disagree with this, but allow me to use a similar example as I did very early on in this thread;

 

A man can learn to play an instrument, say the bass guitar (my particular instrument of choice) without any instruction whatsoever, without ever having heard music, but it is far, far easier to have Jaco Pastorius teach you, and the chances of never having heard music and never having seen a bass guitar (or any instrument) and still becoming a top class musician are very slim indeed.

 

Meditation is a tool that can lead to some literally extraordinary experiences. Are they all the same experiences, what are the commonalities, the differences?[/Quote]

 

I have answered this partially above, I don't really have time to go into it now, but I will be happy to answer from a philosophical perspective the experiences of Buddhist concentration/analysis.

 

Questions of physiological and neurochemical alteration also spring to mind, but unless any of us have expertise in those fields and transcendent states, we're not going to get far with them.

 

I am lacking in those fields so can't really help I'm afraid, there have been tests done that show that brain chemistry changes with prolonged periods of meditation but I don't know any details about them, I don't really concern myself with that other than on a passing level.

[PaliRichard 10]

the practise more about not doing, than doing

 

Strictly, and I mean strictly from the Buddhist perspective this is the only real thing you've written I disagree with.

 

When you apply Buddhist philosophy to the meditation then doing is very much required, that's why the Buddha used the boat simile (and other schools paraphrased it), so that the doing wasn't mistaken for the result.

 

I stress from the Buddhist perspective because other systems that use the same mechanics of meditation to the Buddhists do, as you correctly say 'not do'.

[PaliRichard 10]

A meditator stands on his own two feet.

 

Most of them sit down

 

(breaks the ice at parties)

[janie48 95]

A preacher needs followers.

 

A meditator stands on his own two feet.

 

I would rather be a follower then a preacher!

[pattricia 574]

I would rather be a follower then a preacher!

 

janie we have a lot to learn havent we ? All this jostling for positions as to who is right and who is wrong is ridiculous, and just goes against all the preachings of the great meditationallist.

[janie48 95]

janie we have a lot to learn havent we ? All this jostling for positions as to who is right and who is wrong is ridiculous, and just goes against all the preachings of the great meditationallist.

 

Totally agree.

On the other hand,I myself am not always as restrained as i would like to be. I write as i speak,and sometimes that can cause problems!