[Don SalmonMember]

thanks much for listening. We’re going to put together a video too; just working on it now:>)) (may be awhile though; we probably won’t get the youtube channel for this up for at least several weeks).

[Don SalmonMember]

Bernadette – you get my vote for best post ever at Dharma Treasure Community.

waving at you waving being a wavicle intermingling, inter-playing, smiling, laughing inseparably with all other waves oceaning/Being together…….

[Don SalmonMember]

oh, it also is extremely useful for lowering blood pressure for some people (not for me – but others have used it for this purpose)

[Don SalmonMember]

Hi Matthew:

This may be different from what you’re looking for – I’ve used it since 1985 and have found it profoundly useful in many contexts. I have used it as the main means of recovering from severe back spasms; as a means of learning to transition from waking into a dream with full awareness, to fall asleep when having a bout of insomnia, and as a means of deepening samata.

http://www.swamij.com/online61.htm

I would suggest trying it for at least a week, daily, to see if it is suitable for you. Also, try as soon as you can to memorize the 61 points (it only takes a few minutes once you get the general contours).

You may want to experiment – one cycle of breath for each point; or just breathing naturally and going from point to point as you feel you have gone deeply, viscerally, into the muscles.

For lucid dreaming, I have found almost invariably that some time after I get to the left leg, vivid hypnagogic images begin to arise. If you can stay with them without losing awareness, you will at some point find yourself in a lucid dream.

For developing samata, going through all 61 points then returning to the heart center and staying in the Still point can be very powerful – thoughts subside completely.

[Don SalmonMember]

Hi JC:

No problem at all. Sam’s a bright guy, and besides, it’s always quite valuable to examine views that are different from the ones we hold. I make a point of reading right wing and left wing views online, and taking Julie’s suggestion, if you can see the aggregates that make up the empty views, it makes for a good foundation for equanimity, samata!

Not that there is not something “True” underlying the views, but it takes more than Sam knows to get there:>))

[Don SalmonMember]

Excellent point, Julie. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche also understands that looking into the “light of awareness” which is inseparable from boundless space, does give insight into the nature of the universe.

Sam Harris believes that a yogi sitting in a cave, as he describes it, doesn’t have any insight about anything but his own mind.

It’s this dualism which, to me, pretty much rules out Harris as a source of significant insight about much of anything.

[Don SalmonMember]

Just a note – Culadasa has written an excellent (though very brief) critique of Stephen Batchelor’s view of no-self in TMI. My sense is that he would apply the same critique to Sam Harris, who, while superficially appearing to present a no-self view similar to Buddhism, actually veers way over into the fundamental error of nihilism.

It could be a very interesting exercise to watch both videos, and see if you can tell the profound difference between Adyashanti’s presentation and that of Sam Harris.

[Don SalmonMember]

re: Just to be clear, are you saying that nama and rupa are two specifically different things?

Distinguishable, but not separate, not “inherently existent.”

Distinguishable in the same way an apple can be distinguished from an orange, without in any way compromising or negating the essential unity (but not uniformity!) of all.

****

I did think of another specific recommendation – anything and everything by Alan Wallace. If you want something more specific, “Confessions of a Buddhist Skeptic’ (the title being a direct, and I think, well-deserved, rebuke to Stephen Batchelor – see Culadasa’s comment about him) and “Mind in the Balance.”

[Don SalmonMember]

Sure. I would just recommend, at some point, talking with someone directly or actually studying some Buddhist philosophy on emptiness. There are, I’ve found, points at which such study can clarify issues that come up in practice. Culadasa has some good recommendations in the back of TMI.

[Don SalmonMember]

Hi 5adja5b:

I saw your post and initially wasn’t sure what I could say that would be helpful, without knowing more about you and your practice. However, this just occurred to me and perhaps it could help.

I did my doctoral dissertation on mindfulness and pain reduction. The way it originated was in doing work with pain patients in the mid 1990s. After working with folks for a few months, I began to notice that a majority were not really “getting” the unique value of mindfulness, and were mostly benefiting from the relaxation and breathing that accompanied it.

I estimated that about 1/3 actually went through a cognitive “shift” – that is, they experientially “got” that what they were experiencing as “pain” – i.e. an objective ‘thing” that was ‘really” ‘there’ – was largely an interpretation. In other words, they were able to distinguish (but not “separate”) name and form.

This is very clear when you look at the distinct brain systems involved in interpreting pain signals. Put in very simple language, say you cut your hand. There is a very primitive “instinctive” alert system which has the simple purpose of signaling the existence of an injury along with the need to do something about it.

There’s a different system, which triggers an emotional reaction – “this pain is ‘bad’, i don’t like, it should go away.’ And there’s a “mental” response involving various regions of the cortex, “why does this always happen to me, i’m such a klutz” etc.

And on top of it all, there’s the self-system, “Why does this always happen to ME?!”

With increasing refinement and stability of attention, these various factors can actually be “seen.” What’s always fascinated me about working with pain, is that the simple seeing of this, the simple act of distinguishing these has the almost immediate effect of lessening the experienced pain (it has physiological effects too, but that’s another story).

Perhaps the most important thing is not the attention itself, but the fact that the pain experience is entirely bound up in the way you attend to it. The “knowing’ of the pain is inseparable from the pain.

Well, you can apply this not only to pain but to every aspect of our experience. If you bring the same attention to any emotion, you’ll also find it’s made up of a host of factors, and all of them come together to make up what we name “anger” or “sadness’ or whatever.

This is true of all of our perceptions as well, which is where it gets really interesting. It’s true of a tree, a desk, a stone, etc (which doesn’t mean the tree, desk or stone “only” exist as your perception!)

Well, that’s enough to meditate on for a few years. Don’t make my mistake and spend too much time trying to “figure it out.” Keep practicing, which will make it infinitely clearer than all the books you could read on sunyata. (which is not to say that studying such books is not helpful as well; it’s just taken me too many years to find the right balance, which for me is about 10:1 meditation: study:>))

[Don SalmonMember]

Jevan, I think Culadasa’s book provides a helpful answer.

The question “Do you think your chair is conscious?” appears to me – if I understand the context correctly – to be based on the kind of perceptions and assumptions about the world, about chairs, and about consciousness that are taken for granted in the earlier stages.

If you read in Culadasa’s book about what starts to happen to the perception of the body, the layers of “consciousness” (subtler and subtler aspects of awareness) that begin to unfold as the “silence” that begins with the ending of verbal thought begins to permeate to deeper and deeper levels – I think the understanding of the nature of panpsychism changes altogether.

I don’t know specifically what Ted was referring to when he said “consciousness is everywhere” – but if the word “consciousness” is taken to mean “consciousness as it appears to us when our attention is barely stabilized” – I don’t understand panpsychism to mean that.

At least, that’s not what matter and mind being perfectly correlated throughout the universe means in the Middle Way Philosophy as interpreted by Alan Wallace. In the end notes to MI, Culadasa notes that, though he disputes some pop interpretations of Vedanta which make the “witness” the ultimate, he is in agreement with the views of Ramana Maharshi and other non-dual Vedantins. In Advaita Vedanta (and even more integrally in some tantric views, in both Hinduism and Buddhism), nama-rupa, name and form, mind and matter, are thoroughly entwined, but neither can be reduced to the other. One “may” posit “Consciousness” or “Being-Consciousness” as That which integrates the two. But without a stable mind, this can be misleading.

Steve Hagen has a great and incredibly simple example of how the unstable mind cannot “hold” on to momentary awakenings to non duality.

He gives the example of the good guys and bad guys in the old Western movies. The good guys wore the white hats; the bad guys, the black hats. A nice simple position – good guys vs bad guys, white hat vs black hat.

So how to you transcend that duality? No hat.

And for a brief moment, you’re free. And then it sneaks in – ‘hat” vs “no hat” and you’re back in duality.

Same problem with understanding panpsychism when our minds have not fully stabilized. Our old assumptions of what “mind” and “matter” and “consciousness” and “space” and “time’ keep creeping in, all founded on a fundamental misperception of reality as dualistic.

The best versions of panpsychism I’ve seen (in the Buddhist tantras, for example) understand it as a “skillful means” – a way of avoiding the tendency to fall into one of the extremes of materialism or idealism, but then to be left behind as nondual recognition awakens and stabilizes.

[Don SalmonMember]

hi folks,

just wanted to stop by to update you on attention/awareness/brain info.

I’ve been trying to be very careful not to fall into the “brain localization” fallacy in an e-course on mindfulness and the brain I’ve been working on. In fact, many of you may be aware that Culadasa, in the endnotes to “Mind Illuminted,” does NOT identify attention strictly with the “left hemisphere.”

Well I just saw an excellent Scientific American article which speaks of 3 attention networks, that I thought sheds some further light on this phenomenon. Here is it: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-real-neuroscience-of-creativity/

[Don SalmonMember]

http://www.swamij.com/online61.htm

I’ve used this exercise for many years to help with falling asleep. It may be similar to what Blake describes, as it involves attending to body sensations.

It may be different for many people, but something particularly interesting I find with it is I can predict with some precision the point at which I’m beginning to fall asleep. It is usually somewhere around point 35-45 – somewhere in the left or right leg. The neat thing about this is, if you are interested in dream yoga, it helps you pinpoint the moment which is most appropriate for enterig the dream state.

If you don’t fall asleep after doing the 61 points (they’re very easy to memorize and you shouldn’t need the guided audio after about 2 or 3 times) you might continue with Blake’s method, just moving freely through the body. You will likely find that you’re very very relaxed after doing the 61 points and only a little more mindfulness of the body will get you into dream or sleep land.

I’d love to hear how you do with it.

[Don SalmonMember]

HI Paul:

It sounds to me like both folks are saying, “don’t be concerned for now about philosophic questions.” This is different from self-doubt. Do you really need to resolve this issue in order to motivate you to practice? If so, you might want to save that for an in-depth analytic meditation.

I’d also suggest if you possibly can, find somebody in person you can trust to talk through some of these things. Spinning through them in your head – if you can’t do it stably in analytic meditation – is not likely to resolve it for you.

But perhaps this might be most helpful – I find Stephen Batchelor to be almost incapable of thinking clearly about these things. This has nothing to do with my personal perspective – he simply hasn’t shown any willingness to examine his pre-existing views.

If you try to “figure out” the various philosophic issues, or things like rebirth and karma, without at least a modicum of meditative stability, (or stable attention, as Culadasa might say), whatever “solution” you come to isn’t going to mean that much anyway – and you’ll be subject to further doubt in the future.

I’ve found that when I was convinced – not intellectually, but viscerally – of the value of meditation, I kept practicing. It took me 6 years of wavering, but once I started, I continued twice a day for decades. It just took that final determination, the intention to simply go ahead though there were many philosophic issues I had barely a clue about (this was back in my mid 20s). The issues do, in my experience – get resolved on their own, if you persist in practice.

That in itself might be motivation to practice!

[Don SalmonMember]

Aha! Just found it. Stephen Kosslyn, whom I assume you know. And here he is, declaring THERE IS NO LEFT BRAIN-RIGHT BRAIN DIVIDE:>))

http://ideas.time.com/2013/11/29/there-is-no-left-brainright-brain-divide/

Just so you don’t lose heart in McGilchrist’s work, virtually every idea in Kosslyn’s 2013 article is painstakingly dealt with in McGilchrist’s book (written several years before the article). In Kosslyn’s critiques of McGilchrist, even when they’re in conversation together, Kosslyn continues to interpret McGilchrist through the extremely naive lens Kosslyn presents in his Time magazine article. My sense in reading Kosslyn (i had this sense about him when I first read about his work in my intro psych class back in the 1980s) is that he’s someone who lives so completely in the selective attention mode that he simply interprets everything McGilchrist is saying through that mode. I’ve found in talking with materialist skeptics and sometimes with extreme conservatives (and yes, sometimes extreme materialist/Marxist leftists as well) that understanding this attention/awareness distinction helps enormously in stepping outside altogether from the framework they’re talking within and coming at it in a wholly different manner.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 7 months ago by  Don Salmon.

[Author]

Posts