The Mind Illuminated Pdf 87
Joseph Zyiuahndy
At that time I was taught that these experiences indicated I was beginning to see what was really real, behind the illusion of ordinary experience which, by contrast, is not really real. Nowadays I prefer to regard any states of mind, however extraordinary or mundane they may be, as versions of ontological experience.
On the other hand, dissociative experience can be harmful. Fixating it as the only important reality can lead to feeling stuck, drowning in a sea of meaninglessness, personal isolation, becoming an air-head, or psychological pain. Without the ability to move fluidly between different cognitive states, dissociation disturbs practical and social functionality.
[Post edit: at this point, the TMI practice has substantially diverged from shi-ne meditation. The experience of being irritated, annoyed or distracted by sounds arising during meditation is alien to my usual practice. This experience was both fascinating and horrific. I got so mad. ]
This sounds to me like it completely reverses the point made in the attention/awareness dichotomy, where you can be attentive to one thing but aware of many others at the same time. After all, if consciousness can only contain one thing at a time, what room is there for peripheral awareness? Culadasa states that each individual moment is either a moment of attention, or a moment of awareness. Moments of awareness can contain many things:
The conscious mind acts as a universal recipient of information. It can receive information from each and every separate, unconscious sub-mind. In fact, all conscious experience is simply an ongoing stream of moments of consciousness whose content has been projected into the conscious mind by unconscious subminds. Then, when information enters consciousness, it becomes immediately available to all the other sub-minds. Therefore, the conscious mind also serves as a universal source of information. Because the conscious mind is both a universal recipient and a universal source of information, all the unconscious sub-minds can interact with each other through the conscious mind.
There are a lot of ideas that were, once, cutting edge research and are now so well understood and taught that they are accessible to the average person/student. Calculus and chemistry are two examples that went through the transition fairly recently.
Latin is probably a more unfair example. Even the average modern student who is required/tries to learn Latin will probably have far lower motivation than the average medieval student of Latin. Those are very different populations as well.
Collectively, we do seem to have figured out better methods to teach/learn a lot of things. Playing music is one well-studied area where the evidence is pretty clear. There are pieces that were either considered unplayable or so difficult that mistakes by top concert performers were tolerated, but are now part of the repertoire of an intermediate player. My belief is that a lot of this comes from (a) better staging and scaffolding, (b) making the knowledge seem mundane instead of arcane. TMI appears to attempt both (other meditation works and general cultural discussion are also part of the second part).
IMO, geometry and statistics have many concepts that are perfectly accessible to middle school and some elementary school children. The problem with both is that most of these concepts are taught with a jargon-filled wrapper that makes them inaccessible.
Another upside to this approach is that there are folks who struggle at algebra and calculus that do okay in geometry and/or statistics (or at least parts of them). Having material they find accessible earlier on in the process could reduce whatever effect there is from some folks getting discouraged in math at an early age.
Playing music is one well-studied area where the evidence is pretty clear. There are pieces that were either considered unplayable or so difficult that mistakes by top concert performers were tolerated, but are now part of the repertoire of an intermediate player. My belief is that a lot of this comes from (a) better staging and scaffolding, (b) making the knowledge seem mundane instead of arcane.
As a music professor (I forgot who, was from Germany IIRC) stated in an interview: the average student at a conservatorium today is a better pianist than Mozart ever was at any time in his life. I can see several reasons (not for Music only):
Mankind had grown, that means more people are on the top end of the bell curve (just like the US gets more gold medals than Belgium). There are more fields to specialize in, which gives people a better fit for their field.
Better health and better nourishment provide better physical foundations for higher functioning for all.
Exposure (just hearing adults talk about something; hearing musicoids even in the elevator) prepares the mind/brain for easier understanding.
Free time to learn/practice/tinker/play and a society that provides the means for a specialized drill from early age on (think e.g. Lang Lang) allow a steeply rising competence curve early on.
I agree. Meditation has not made my mind less creative in any way or shut down the ability to generate tangents. If anything, I can call up a blizzard of related-concept thoughts more easily because I am less afraid of the stuff that lurks in my mind.
If you want to understand nirvana, light a candle. Take it into a dark place. Appreciate its light. Then blow it out. Or take heroin; I gather that works about as well. Certainly it enables one to maintain perfect equanimity in the face of wonders and atrocities alike. Why anyone would seek that, I also have no idea.
And one last thing. Remember: it is your inalienable right to call bullshit on whatever you think deserves it. Use it carefully; mishandled, it can cause you enormous confusion. But do use it, nonetheless.
Because monasteries serve many other purposes, and the practice of meditation was not chief among them when the European missionaries and scholars arrived, translated what they called the Sacred Books Of The East and informed the monks that actually, that meditation thing was what they were supposed to be doing.
In my anecdotal experience, any goal during meditation, including focusing on the breath can become an object of neuroticism. Most modern instructions relating to meditation seem to fall in to this trap of goal-oriented thinking. If the goal of meditation is to be all-accepting of our current moment, then surely practicing to change our present moment is antithetical to it.
I also find this apparent dichotomy between attention and awareness unconvincing. I am much more inclined to believe that our attentional spotligiht flickers across multiple sensory modes extremely quickly. And that this gives the appearance of a peripheral awareness. What he calls peripheral awareness just sounds like the collection of sensory input that has low saliency, and therefore spends less time in the attentional spotlight.
Attention is my default. Awareness is a mental mode I have to deliberately turn on. It is the difference between looking at a chair, and looking at a room containing a chair which you are nominally focusing your eyes on.
I can effectively only maintain one or the other at any given time; either I have mental tunnel vision focusing on one thing, or I have no focus whatsoever because my mental tunnel vision is pointed at awareness itself.
I think that in a lot of endeavors, including meditation, there are maybe 100 things you need to know and get right, and most people will automatically or intuitively get 90 of them right. Communication problems happen when the ten things that people get wrong are variable. If you have never run into anyone whose mind works that way, you do not even know it was possible to miss it or get it wrong.
For the understanding of this it must be known that, for a soul to attain to the state of perfection, it has ordinarily first to pass through two principal kinds of night, which spiritual persons call purgations or purifications of the soul; and here we call them nights, for in both of them the soul journeys, as it were, by night, in darkness.
And this first night pertains to beginners, occurring at the time when God begins to bring them into the state of contemplation; in this night the spirit likewise has a part, as we shall say in due course. And the second night, or purification, pertains to those who are already proficient, occurring at the time when God desires to bring them to the state of union with God. And this latter night is a more obscure and dark and terrible purgation, as we shall say afterwards.
There are other souls who labour and weary themselves to a piteous extent, and yet go backward, seeking profit in that which is not profitable, but is rather a hindrance; and there are still others who, by remaining at rest and in quietness, continue to make great progress. There are others who are hindered and disturbed and make no progress, because of the very consolations and favours that God is granting them in order that they may make progress. And there are many other things on this road that befall those who follow it, both joys and afflictions and hopes and griefs: some proceeding from the spirit of perfection and others from imperfection. Of all these, with the Divine favour, we shall endeavour to say something, so that each soul who reads this may be able to see something of the road that he ought to follow, if he aspire to attain to the summit of this Mount.
If he who is giving the Exercises sees that he who is receiving them is going on in consolation and with much fervor, he ought to warn him not to make any inconsiderate and hasty promise or vow: and the more light of character he knows him to be, the more he ought to warn and admonish him. For, though one may justly influence another to embrace the religious life, in which he is understood to make vows of obedience, poverty and chastity, and, although a good work done under vow is more meritorious than one done without it, one should carefully consider the circumstances and personal qualities of the individual and how much help or hindrance he is likely to find in fulfilling the thing he would want to promise.
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