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One Love
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Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 11/11/2011 7:15 PM (GMT -6) |   | | Say this to yourself mentally over and over again...
"I am using this body's brain."
Seriously. Say it about 30 or 40 times or so. You can even move your body around when you say it. You are using the body that you are moving, sensing, experiencing. Really make yourself believe it.
Now...ask yourself...really quick like...
"Who is using this body's brain? "
You may immediately say/sense..."I am."
RIGHT THEN...ask...
Who is saying "I am"?
There may be a thought/sense that says "I am"
at which point, it's again asked...Who is saying "I am"?
And so on it goes...
There's only one way to "leap" out of the self-referecing loop of this question that lodges itself in the dianoia.
Just think about it over and over and over and over until...
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 11/16/2011 9:11 AM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 11/17/2011 2:12 PM (GMT -6) | | | Repostings...
There is an irreducible opposition between the deep transcendent self that awakens only in contemplation, and the superficial, external self which we commonly identify with the first person singular. We must remember that the superficial "I" is not our real self. It is our "individuality" and our "empirical self" but it is not truly the hidden and mysterious person in whom we subsist before the eyes of God. The "I" that works in the world, thinks about itself, observes his own reactions and talks about itself is not the true "I" that has been united to God in Christ. It is at best the vesture, the mask, the disguise of that mysterious and unknown "self" whom most of us never discover until we are dead. Our external, superficial self is not eternal, not spiritual, far from it. This self is doomed to disappear as completely as smoke from a chimney.
Thomas Merton
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The Christian "self" can say this:
"Who I truly am includes, yet transcends, my mind/brain unity or any of it's activities, including the emergence of my self-referential, self-reflective loop, called my ego. I HAVE a human mind. However, the totality of who I am isn't exhausted by my mental, psychological, or emotional activity. Moreover, that aspect of me that transcends (yet finds embodiment in) my mind/brain unity is in a continuous dependent, transparent, and reciprocal love relationship with the personal Source of my being, the Uncreated Creator Spirit, also the Holy Spirit of the Risen God-man Jesus."
But we cannot know that we are more than our self-referential self-narration going on in our MINDS...unless we experience STILLNESS. It is in stillness in God's Presence, living in our union with God, that we can experience our self-transcendence on a sustained, non-despairing level. When the mind is still in the heart, only "felt presence" exists in the human heart. Presence-in-presence. presence-in-Presence. In this, we discover the Personal Creator Spirit at the core of who we truly are...and the core of all particular things and/or systems in existence.
I think that this is what separates humans from every other animal: the capacity to self-reflectively experience one's own unique, incommunicable self-transcendence (particularity) and simulateneously, oneness with all things and be-ings (universality) through that self-transcendence. (Love the neighbor [universality] as oneself [particularity] )
IMO, this is why asceticism (hesychasm) is so important to Christianity...or spirituality in general. If the human being can't break enough away from biological hypostasis to understand that they TRULY ARE spiritual beings AND WHAT THAT MEANS...then we can never find out who we really are, and in so doing, find the rest and peace God want to give us: our FULL humanity in Christ-the-Logos.
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"Anyone who is thinking of the Spiritual Presence of Christ the Logos always within himself, he is first-class spiritual person. If you want perfection in human spirituality, don't be satisfied only by practicing a course of religious bodily positions and actions. You have to go further. Actually, the perfection of spiritual growth means when you are in "single-eyed stillness", always thinking of the 'Christ the Logos as Divine Center' form of the Lord within your heart, without being disturbed... Controlling all the senses and the mind, bringing the mind into the 'heart.' You have to control the mind, control the senses, and concentrate everything on the form of the the Logos. That is called perfection of the human spiritual walk."
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 11/17/2011 1:19:53 PM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 11/17/2011 5:16 PM (GMT -6) | | "Why Do We Fear An Empty Mind?"
Loved the initial quote...
"Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he feels his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness."
Blaise Pascal
In the article...
When self is absent and thoughts negated, we are open to the unknown. Not only does the mind become utterly blank, but it loses the all encompassing idea of a personal ego. We are oblivious to all lower sensations and are instead awake to the rich, conscious and sublime nothingness. Since the capacity to remain in this state for more than a few minutes can impose a strain, the intellect or imagination rush in with ideas or images, thus ending the tension. With time and practice we can endure the weight of this indescribable and incomprehensible experience.
This is hesychasm brings it's uniqueness in. The conscious applied Jesus Prayer is used to corral and direct the intellect and imagination for "guarding the heart" when not in the imageless state.
On Practicing the Jesus Prayer
by St. Ignaty Brianchaninov
From there...
St. John of the Ladder counsels that the mind should be locked into the words of the prayer and should be forced back each time it departs from it (Step XXVIII, ch. 17). Such a mechanism of prayer is remarkably helpful and suitable. When the mind, in its own manner, acquires attentiveness, then the heart will join it with its own offering—compunction. The heart will empathize with the mind by means of compunction, and the prayer will be said by the mind and heart together. The words of the prayer ought to be said without the feast hurry. even lingering, so that the mind can lock itself into each word. St. John of the Ladder consoles and instructs the coenobitic brethren who busy themselves about monastic obediences and encourages them thus to persevere in prayerful asceticism: "From those monks who are engaged in performing obediences," he writes, "God does not expect a pure and undistracted prayer. Despair not should inattention come over you! Be of cheerful spirit and constantly compel your mind to return to itself! For the angels alone are not subject to any distraction" (Step IV, ch. 93). "Being enslaved by passions, let us persevere in praying to the Lord: for all those who have reached the state of passionlessness did so with the help of such indomitable prayer. If, therefore, you tirelessly train your mind never to stray from the words of the prayer, it will be there even at mealtime. A great champion of perfect prayer has said: 'I had rather speak five words with my understanding ... than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue' (I Cor. 14:19). Such prayer," that is, the grace-given prayer of the mind in the heart, which shuns imaginings, "is not characteristic of children; wherefore we who are like children, being concerned with the perfection of our prayer," that is, the attentiveness which is acquired by locking the mind into the words of the prayer, "must pray a great deal. Quantity is the cause of quality. The Lord gives pure prayer to him who, eschewing laziness, prays much and regularly in his own manner, even if it is marred by inattention" (The Ladder, Step XXVI11, ch. 21).
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. Post Edited (One Love) : 11/17/2011 4:50:34 PM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 11/20/2011 1:09 PM (GMT -6) | | Nondualism superficially resembles solipsism, but from a nondual perspective solipsism mistakenly fails to consider subjectivity itself. Upon careful examination of the referent of "I," i.e. one's status as a separate observer of the perceptual field, one finds that one must be in as much doubt about it, too, as solipsists are about the existence of other minds and the rest of "the external world." (One way to see this is to consider that, due to the conundrum posed by one's own subjectivity becoming a perceptual object to itself, there is no way to validate one's "self-existence" except through the eyes of others—the independent existence of which is already solipsistically suspect!) Nondualism ultimately suggests that the referent of "I" is in fact an artificial construct (merely the border separating "inner" from "outer," in a sense), the transcendence of which constitutes enlightenment.
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