Lmst

In tonight's #meditation I was reminded that spiritual frameworks often posit a kind of goal — they speak of a place to journey to, a place to reach, a state to realize. Such stories have their role, but for me these days practice is about allowing an embrace with what's already here. And *not leaving.*

Not leaving even for the distance of a thought.

I use this image often. On the left is an evening primrose as we see it. On the right is the same flower photographed with film that's sensitive to ultraviolet — bees and butterflies can see ultraviolet.

I've been in a mood much of today. And in tonight's #meditation there was a rather distinct sense for how a "mood" is just a coloring of our mind.

on the left, a yellow, four-petaled evening primrose flower, and on the right the same flower photographed with film that detects ultraviolet, and showing a star-like "nectar guide" pattern in the center of the flower

@impermanen_

I had a buddy in high school who was a Vietnamese refugee. His sponsor family were friends with my family. Sad, tragic stories of what he'd seen and been through. But he did well here.

And I got to see him last year this time in a bit of a reunion. He's doing well. (So is his English 🙂.)

a dogwood tree grows at the edge of my yard, outside #Asheville NC, currently in bloom

#BloomScrolling

blue skies behind the branches a dogwood tree with a good many four-petaled white flowers

I've had a number of transpersonal experiences thru the years — altered states; knowledge-at-a-distance; precognitions; visions — and for me a main take-away from those sorts of experiences is, not that I should chase after them, but that I should appreciate I don't know everything and that "ordinary" experience itself is a wonder.

@impermanen_

I've used ChatGPT a few times to get suggested further references in connection with some writing I'm doing.

It recently misquoted a passage ... the original of which I had in front of me ... I pointed out it was mistaken ... it misquoted it again ... and again ... I then posted for it the correct version ... and ChatGPT then offered me two apologies, with an invitation to vote on which was the best apology. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[posted in another thread]

Long-time contemplative, I've studied cross-cultural parallels in meditative experience and techniques, and see over and over the practice of a kind of *honesty* ... an honesty more immediate than words ... which can come to poetic expression as "a knowing like love like what it is to be."

@discoverartists

https://mstdn.social/deck/@bodhidave/113143701669571621

2.2

I suspect #Zen practitioners' non-thinking and the Western via negativa contemplatives' unknowing are connected. Zazen and the practice of "negative" contemplation allow an embrace from a living truth which we cannot know or think.

In this regard our knowing and thinking — they're always already too late.

1.2

In tonight's #meditation the sense was rather like that of Werner Heisenberg's, “Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”

We don't consciously know how to do dreamless sleep, or how to do dreams, or how we do our thinking waking state — how those happen.

@Alice

I keep a close watch on this heart of mine
I keep my eyes wide open all the time
I keep the ends out for the tie that binds
... I walk the line

🎵

@ruben

It can definitely be daunting. :)

But, while I'm not much of a proselytizer, I have no hesitation recommending doing an intensive #meditation retreat at some point in our lives. Nothing else quite like it.

@ruben

Speaking very generally ...

Many #Zen retreats go seven days. It often takes 3 days to get quiet. Day 4 is frequently one of transition. Days 5 and 6 are often creatively productive and unpredictable, and — again speaking generally — that can be when I tend to get more pronounced but wholesome struggles, but also periods of calm and beauty. Day 7 is typically a day of re-integration and resolution.

I typically go a little crazy during intensive silent #meditation retreats. And I always feel more psychically healthy afterwards. My sense of it is, that as we get really quiet and present and "out of the way," we become a safe enough place for whatever healing we're ready for to take place.

1 - Lunaria annus blooming at the edge of my yard today ... a.k.a., "Honesty" ... a.k.a., "money plant" or "silver dollar" because...

2 - this is what it will become in the fall

#BloomScrolling

a green-leafed plant with a clump of four-petaled purple blossoms

a branch of light brown plant seedpods that look like "silver dollars"

🙏 ❤️

#meditation

$If, before beginning serious investigation, we were jestingly to say that all beings are striving after contemplation {theoria}—not merely those endowed with reason but ... even plants and the earth that begets them—and that they all, in their degree, attain to contemplation of reality and its refractions here below, who would listen to such nonsense? But we ... run no risk in treating our own doctrine jestingly. Could it be true that in jesting we are contemplating? Yes. As do all who jest, in jesting we contemplate.... Children and adults, jesting or serious, seem to have no other purpose except contemplation. To contemplation all actions tend.... Now we would speak of the nature of that contemplation we attribute to earth, trees, and growing things in general ... and how Nature, which is said to lack reason and feeling, contemplates and produces all its effects through that contemplation. (Enneads, 3.8.1.1-24, O’Brien, p. 163) how does Nature achieve contemplation? Because it produces while remaining unmoved and within itself ... Nature is itself contemplation. (Enneads, 3.8.3.1-2, O’Brien, p. 164)$

1/2

[offered in response to a post speaking of love for Mother Gaia:]

Plotinus might have a different take on "Mother Nature," as potentially too sensorial for him — he was about letting go of all that is created in order to encounter a selfless embrace from the nameless source of all that is. But, on the other hand, he understood *everything* to be an expression of and an example of the meditative.

Anyway, I happened to have this passage in front of me when I saw the post about Mother Gaia:

Were one to ask Nature why it produces: it might—if willing—thus reply: “You should never have put the question. As I am silent and little given to talk, you should have tried to understand silently.... That what comes into being is what I see in my silence—its natural object. I am myself born of contemplation; mine is a contemplative nature. The contemplative in me produces the object contemplated much as the geometers draw their figures while they contemplate. I do not draw. But, contemplating, I drop from within me the lines constitutive of bodily forms.... The principles that brought me into being ... too, were born of contemplation and ... gave me birth. ... they contemplated themselves and thus was I born.” (Enneads 3.8.4.1-13, O’Brien, p. 165; Armstrong, p. 369)

- the Greek word here in the first line for “produces” is poieo, “creates”; which is related to our word “poem.”
- for “contemplation” Plotinus most often uses theoria in these lines, but he also uses theama, which typically means “a sight” or “a spectacle.”
- “contemplative nature” here is philotheamona physin, the etymology for which could be understood to mean “a sights-loving nature.”
- and “rational principles” is logon, which is related of course to our word “logic.”

In tonight's #meditation I'm reminded that for me it's about participating in *the way experience works.* Having special mystical moments (I've had a few) or becoming an ethical saint (still working on that 🙂) — those I find to be less the goals of meditation than they are *results.* They're results of actually appreciating how experience works.

Put another way:

Seeing more clearly what's going on, it's easy to fall in love with living being ... and, then, to live as a loving being.

In tonight's #meditation there was a moment where it made sense why practice instructions can include things like the suggestion, "Don't think right or wrong."

It's to do with how right/wrong thinking is a "booted up" event. It's extra. It's added. It's too much.

Kind of like how thinking right or wrong doesn't much come up when we encounter a pinecone.

a brown pine cone on the ground, with some pine needles and grass

Years ago, I was in a markedly blissful state for several days. While meditating on the floor of my apartment, a pair of cats I'd never seen pushed their way in from outdoors — I'd apparently not closed the door all the way — and started rubbing against me, purring their little heads off.

They could feel it.

.
h/t @keithwilson

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