dude seeking light

Get sick, do nothing for a few days, get out of meditation routine, couple weeks pass and then bink I realize I have fallen out of practice.

And that’s ok!

The last few days I have been getting back into it and the theme that keeps popping up is this idea of seeking enlightenment, and how that can be a trap. It’s similar to Gangaji’s ‘stopping’ that I mentioned earlier, but I guess it is good to get a refresher on it because I forget it, my mind forgets it, and settles back into a routine where it believes it has to do something or get something to find peace and meaning.

Here is an Osho video I watched on Friday that describes it pretty well:

I don’t know anything about this guy but there was truth in what he had to say.   That we cannot get what we already have.  That we cannot turn enlightenment into an achievement or an ambition.  Essentially that would be chasing after something we already have.

If the mind seeks enlightenment it becomes an object and we would seek it with the same conditioning that we seek other objects in our life.

He also talks about how our language cannot be successfully used to describe enlightenment.  The words and descriptions we would use are created by the conditioned mind and will be heavily biased in subject-object jargon.   Language will never be adequate to describe the experience, or to describe silence.

And to take it a step further.  Let’s say that we decide being still, or resting in stillness, or quieting the mind, is the most  appropriate to achieve enlightenment.  Even turning that into an object will leave us grasping.  Here is a good description of that phenomena:

It’s like…if you try to be ‘still’ it will never happen as the mind will continue to race endlessly.  But if you stop resisting all movement, stop resisting everything, then you are moving with the river of life and can experience stillness.  Even though there is movement.  It’s similar to letting thoughts come and go without identifying with them, just let them come and go and over time the mind will identify more with the stillness than with the thoughts.

Just meditated for 30 minutes.  Starting to get back into a regular meditation routine and it feels good.

Today was mostly focusing on the breath.  Still seems like holding the “I” thought or the “I am” thought in awareness starts to feel like I am thinking too much.  Whereas focusing on breath and letting thoughts come and go feels more natural at this point.

I do want to mention something that happened on Friday.  I hesitate to describe it because I know words aren’t going to do it justice…

Went for a bike ride into town and once I got out in nature I was experiencing some ‘snapshots’.  I don’t really know what else to call them so I will use that term for now.  It’s like….it feels a little like perceiving without thought and whatever I am looking at is so rich and vivid and saturated and just overflowing with detail and warmth.  It happens most often with trees and nature, also noticed it Thursday night with the sun’s reflection onto the sand, but it will also  sometimes happen with normal/mundane things like my bike lock resting against the bike frame.

So…what exactly is this?  I don’t know for sure and I hesitate to talk about it too much or describe it too much out of fear I will overanalyze it 🙂   I will look into it and see how others describe this experience.

Some confusion!

So just meditated for 30 minutes and have some questions about what exactly I’m doing.  It’s like…I’m still a little unsure what exactly I’m supposed to be focusing on in the “I am” realm.  When I become aware of the “I am” thought or the “I” thought it halts my mind in its tracks, and there is instant awareness of existing and being.  But it doesn’t last.  After 10-20 seconds it turns into mind activity and then when I try to return to the “I am” again and again it seems like it starts to turn into a repetitive thought pattern.

And isn’t the whole idea here to disidentify with the thoughts and self so that the true self and beingness can come through?

Compared to…last year I was meditating and just focusing on the breath, essentially trying to clear the mind.  Letting thoughts come and go, and consistently returning to the breath.

So I think I still have this belief that the purpose of meditation is to clear the mind, become no-mind, and when I become aware of the “I am” thought and hold it in awareness it seems to be the opposite of what I was doing a year ago.  Hmmm….

And that’s ok!  I will forge on and see what happens, maybe do a little more research and see if there is an “I am” manual out there 🙂

The other thing on my mind was….

Last night before bed I was holding the “I am” thought in awareness and eventually started to see the “I” as a concept.  It’s like….so many of these spiritual teachings try to shift our identification from the mind/thoughts to the source/being, partly by proving that the self we hold in our heads, what we think of as “me”, is false.

And I believe that to be true.   The “me” we have in our pocket is mostly conceptual and built from conditioning.

So today while meditating I was struggling with the idea of holding the “I” or “I am” in awareness knowing that that “I” is conceptual or false?  What would be the purpose of that?

Something is amiss there and I look forward to digging deeper into it.

Just meditated for 30 minutes.  It felt good.  First 10 minutes or so I was watching the ‘I am’ thought.  Or I guess more just watching the feeling of ‘I am’.   I did this before bed last night and it was awkward, but today it happened much more readily.

Then after about 10 minutes it became hard and I found myself kinda caught up in thoughts.  I’ve noticed this before (when I was meditating regularly a few months ago) where my intention becomes a thought pattern, which seems to kind of defeat the purpose of meditating.  As in…if I focus my attention on the ‘I’ thought I eventually just start thinking about it and repeating it habitually without being fully present and aware of it.

So for the second half of the session I was less present, mind was wandering, and I would regularly return to the breath and the ‘I’ thought, but not as often as the first half of the session.

But I have to admit that when I sat down to meditate my mind immediately picked up where I left off last night and I find that encouraging.

Other thing I want to note is this quote from Maharaj.  I’ve been reading through his “I Am That” book and this part resonated with me:

Q: What benefit is there in knowing that I am not the body?

M: Even to say that you are not the body is not quite true. In a way you are all the bodies, hearts and minds and much more. Go deep into the sense of ‘I am’ and you will find. How do you find a thing you have mislaid or forgotten? You keep it in your mind until you recall it. The sense of being, of ‘I am’ is the first to emerge. Ask yourself whence it comes, or just watch it quietly. When the mind stays in the ‘I am’ without moving, you enter a state which cannot be verbalised but can be experienced. All you need to do is try and try again. After all the sense ‘I am’ is always with you, only you have attached all kinds of things to it — body, feelings, thoughts, ideas, possessions etc. All these self-identifications are misleading. Because of them you take yourself to be what you are not.

Q: Then what am I?

M: It is enough to know what you are not. You need not know what you are. For as long as knowledge means description in terms of what is already known, perceptual, or conceptual, there can be no such thing as self-knowledge, for what you are cannot be described, except as total negation. All you can say is: ‘I am not this, I am not that’. You cannot meaningfully say ‘this is what I am’. It just makes no sense. What you can point out as ‘this’ or ‘that’ cannot be yourself. Surely, you can not be ‘something’ else. You are nothing perceivable, or imaginable. Yet, without you there can be neither perception nor imagination.

Chapter 1. The Sense of “I am”

I AM THAT

Dialogues of Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

I’ve seen this idea pop up a lot lately.   The idea being…instead of seeking more knowledge and trying to figure out exactly who I am, it is enough to just be.  The more time you spend away from identification with the thoughts, i.e. ‘being’ or being aware of ‘being’, the easier it becomes for your true self to emerge.

Ok, so where is my head at?  Good question!  That is after all the purpose of this journal, to keep track of where my head is at, so….

I guess for the past few months I have been mostly interested in non-duality.   I started watching some Buddha at the Gas Pump interviews on YouTube and was immediately drawn to the likes of Gangaji, Mooji, and Rupert Spira.

Many of these teachers were students of Papaji, who himself was  a student of Ramana Maharishi.  I think they could all be put under the Advaita Vedanta umbrella but to be honest I don’t really know the exact specifics of that teaching yet.  I do know that many of them seem to speak the truth of who we are (who I am) and much of what they say resonates with me.

For example, this video…

hints at some of the basic principles of non-duality.  Mostly that we are not our thoughts, we are not the finite self.

I see this in many spiritual disciplines and it seems like many of them do the same thing albeit in different manners.

P.S.  Meditated for 30 minutes today and it felt good.   Didn’t have a set plan or methodology but just felt good to get back to some basic meditation as the last few weeks (xmas/holidays) have been a blur.

Hi.

I feel I’ve got some time to pursue the truth.  And by truth I guess I mean…the truth of who I am, the nature of existence, why we are here.   Lately these big picture questions are becoming more important to me.

I’m creating this journal for a couple reasons.

One, I want a central gathering place for everything I learn and all the various thoughts I have about these topics.

And two,  I’m hoping it will provide some insight on the cycle.  As in…I started getting interested in a different way of living 5 or 6 years ago.  I would find a book that resonated with me (like the Power of Now) and read it and implement a few of the ideas, but inevitably the crush of life would resume and  a few months later I would find myself back in the same place I started from.  This cycle has happened a few times so I’d like to dig a little deeper into it and see what is driving it.

And that’s pretty much it in a nutshell.  I plan on doing a few entries a week at first and seeing how it feels.

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