Interesting read, Abd. Thanks!
As always, you are meticulous in your personal analysis - relentlessly and obsessively so! I suspect it's one of your endearing traits that terrified Mr. Krivit so much. I don't think he knows how to handle: meticulous scrutiny, particularly when the cross-hairs are focused on his own investigative work. One would think that a self-proclaimed investigative reporter would to be able to handle being under the lime-light himself, but there you go. ;-) Some additional comments dispersed between yours: > There are two approaches to this. The first would be to > inquire as to what "awareness" is. We assume that we are > aware. How do we know this? We can program a machine to > spit out the words "I am aware" when certain conditions > arise. > > Yet it does *seem* that there is something other than those > words. Descartes wrote "I think, therefore I am," but what > is this "I"? A more sober statement would be "Thinking, > therefore existence." A favorite contemporary writer/speaker who discusses such topics, including Descartes (briefly) is Eckart Tolle. http://www.eckharttolle.com/ Eckhart's most popular book is "The Power of Now". >From Amazon: http://tinyurl.com/c2x8bnb More on that later. > My own training is that the "I" is illusory, I suspect so too. > it's how the > brain refers to its own activity, but that activity is > automatic, patterns of neurons firing. There isn't any self > there, just a sense of identity that is only a pattern of > patterns. That actually can't be specifically identified or > found. I suspect it's might not be inaccurate to say the "I" we personally experience is the hive-mind of the entire neural network that comprises our brain activity. > Yet that same training does point to something else. We can > experience something else, yet that "something else" is still > experienced, we might think, through the brain. Or is it? And > there is no answer to this question, not really. From my > experience, there is a different quality to this "something else," > it is not personal, it is not individual, even though it's a > well-spring of inspiration and self-expression. > > Again, the training: all these questions are invented, made up, > by the brain, as part of our survival mechanism. Yet there is > something other than the world of survival, and, in fact, it can > be plainly experienced. It's "palpable." In this work, it's called > the Self. Experience of the Self seems to be universally possible, > indeed it appears to be *instinctive.* The Self has obviously been > around for a long time, for once one recognizes the Self, there is > plenty of reference to it, back to the oldest writings we have. Getting back to Descartes, I suspect the speaker, Eckhart Tolle, would say something to the effect that one does not have to "think" anything at all in order to inculcate the "...therefore I am" experience. I suspect Eckhart would simply suggest that we learn to stop thinking thoughts altogether. At least for brief spells of time at first in order to begin sensing the totality of nothingness. Later, as one gets the hang of experiencing "nothingness", learn to expand on it. Eckhart would simply say something to the effect of: "Be still, learn to be here in the now, experience the simplicity of the present moment." Such deceptively simple suggestions can drive certain individuals up the wall, particularly those who tend to be impatient, or perhaps those who feel they need complexity cluttering up their lives. It was reported that one disgruntled reader of Eckhart's books mailed one of them back ripped to tiny shreds. It was accompanied with a brick too. As for me, I have often found the contents of his writings useful & helpful. To each his own. Eckhart claims he had an interesting transformational experienced early in his life - a transformation which I can appreciate. I suspect I experienced a similar kind of transformation at around the same age that he experienced his, which was around 25 years of age. Unfortunately in my case I did not fully comprehend the implications of what had just happened to me. I had no one to talk to that could have helped me better inculcate the ramifications in a more effective and practical manner. It has taken me decades to understand the utter simplicity of what had happened to me. > The story of Ahmadinejad, here, in the Jojo dialogues, was a > demonstration of the Self, my suspicion. Ahmadinejad probably didn't > realize this, his comments don't show an awareness of the human Self, > he ascribes his experience to the divine. Maybe. But what he > describes is simply what I might call the Presence. He seems to have > taken it personally. Or not. I'm not his Judge. In my own experiences... what I have inculcated so far, it would seem that one does not need to take any of this "personally." To take any of it "personally" is to lose sight of the fact that a sense of Presence, of Awareness has no use for the seductive trappings of personality, or what some would actually call "false personality". False Personality constantly attempts to take front stage, claiming to be the true "I". It does so by encasing itself within the armor of opinions and belief systems, all of which is temporal by nature. As such, "False Personality" is constantly in fear of its own pending annihilation due to the fact that it is made up of nothing more than temporal opinions and belief systems. In order to survive from minute-to-minute it must defend its existence - often by arguing incessantly about this or that topic for which it has strongly identified with. It has good reason to fear its own animation because when one learns to experience a sense of Presence, found in "nothingness" the need to constantly encase one's "self" within a collection of opinions and beliefs begins to lose its allure. > Experience of the Self makes those ancient references intelligible. > From some level of contact with this, I was, in my twenties, able to > translate the Heart Sutra from the Sanskrit, and I sent my translation > to Edward Conze, probably the world's foremost Buddhist scholar of his > time. I later found out that Conze had a reputation of biting the head > off of students. He didn't bite mine off. Maybe I'd have been better > off if he had! No, he acknowledged my translation, sent it on to the > Buddhist Society of London for use -- it was designed to be chanted > -- and he acknowledged that part of his own translation, which I'd > questioned him about, was not based on the Sanskrit text, but on > Chinese interpretation. I was actually translating from experience > with the subject, which is why I noticed the discrepancy. ... which I would speculate is why Conze didn't bite your head off! ;-) No matter how inexperienced or fleeting the experience might be, direct experience always trumps a translation of someone else's experience. Hands down. > The brain wants, out of its long-established (and necessary) habits, to > "own" this "other." So we "explain it," perhaps. But the explanations are > not the Self. The explanations are just another part of "IT," which is > what we call the brain activity. A newcomer to this work said it well, > "Other than IT, there is nothing." Yup. But, ah, that nothing! And he > knew that, after one weekend. He hadn't been told. It's a standing joke. > In that three-day seminar, it's commonly asked, the last day, > "And what did you get for your $500?" And the room shouts, > unprompted, "Nothing!" And they are overjoyed. No wonder they > call this a cult! > > People have *no right* to be so happy over getting "nothing" > for their money. Right? Heh! But what a great bargain! Something from nothing! ;-) > The leader will also explain that "Nothing we have told you is > the truth." Basically, "we made it up." Again, obvious cult, > eh? Nothing is the truth? What a scam! So they feed people a > load of crap, and the people walk away smiling! > > Except it isn't *exactly* a load of crap. No, it's certainly not a load of crap. However, it is so easy to lose site of the simplicity of it all. All too often we transform it into a genuine pile of shit. I'm still constantly learning to appreciate the value of experiencing "nothingness". I'm sure I'll have to continue practicing experiencing "nothingness" to the day I die... and then some. ;-) > What is conveyed are > called "distinctions," and they are not "truth." If one thinks > they are, one is led into some severe contradictions. No, they > are *inventions.* As are all our explanations that we so naively > imagine are "truth." The only difference is that perhaps these > are distinctions that are empowering, ideas that effectively > and efficiently transform, that actually *work.* Or they would > not continue to be presented! > > (More seriously, I had long experience with various techniques > for reaching that goal. Some of them seem to be free. But you'll > spend many years in practice, to get what these people routinely > and with high reliability get in one weekend. Even 12-step programs > -- which are fantastic! and free -- can *actually cost* more. The > realization can be transient, if not anchored with practice, that's > well known about all the old traditions for reaching this state, > and that hasn't changed, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.) Expanding a little more on this topic, it seems to have taken me most of my life to realize how important it can be to become aware of "nothing." FYI, very early in my life, as early as 15-16 I wanted to be on "the path". In my 20s, (this was back in the 1970s), I took the Transcendental Meditation course in college. I became almost fanatical in my desire to reach some indefinable "spiritual" state of existence. Fortunately, as I've gotten older, having just turned 60, it would seem that I've managed to mellow out a bit. It slowly began to dawn on me that it's ridiculous trying to obtain some enlightened state of consciousness, particularly when one is already there. We are ALL already "there." It's just that most of us don't realize the fact that we are ALL already "there" because it's so easy to lose ourselves within the camouflage of opinions and beliefs we build around our "selves" which False Personality luxuriates in. I think I'm finally beginning to learn how to experience the present moment, to smell all the roses more appreciatively on the endless path one walks. I should mention the fact that I experienced a lot of chronic depression in my life, particularly in my 20s, 30s, and 40s. Much of that depression I can attribute to having an obsessive "A" type personality combined with pinches of dyslexia and ADD (the latter runs in the family). I also wrestled with a plethora self-perceived social norms that often made me feel as if I didn't fit in. As such, I often felt terribly isolated. In other words, I was a pretty normal young adult in the throes of his own self-made world filled with angst. It would seem that one of the major lessons that I have been learning in this particular life-cycle is that "normalcy" is just as much an illusion, like everything else in this universe, so why beat myself up over it. Regards, Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks
