Me too! Every single evening I devote an hour to meditation, and have done for years. But my meditation is not something to talk about, it's something to do.Typist wrote:So the focus is kept on the experience itself, and the goal is simply to feel better. I feel this is a wise approach, which is widely applicable to very many people.
I enthusiastically believe in the healthy healing power of the experience itself.
Yes me too. I have experienced many things in deep meditation, things that for me are of great significance. But I don't really talk about the experience because I simply don't believe I can. I often recommend meditation to people, but as something to try for themselves. Meditation is its own teacher, and meditation can't be turned into a verbal teaching passed from one to another.Typist wrote:I also believe that most of what we think and say about the experience is a bunch of silly ego driven drivel, including my own many burpings on the subject.
I still think you are falling into the egoism is bad trap. If it is through our egoistic desire that we gain enough joy not to have to be selfish any more, then that is an OK process.Typist wrote:However, the spiritual community that discusses enlightenment is not like that priest at all. It's all about "me and my enlightenment."
I think I need to repeat that the spiritual path is not about losing our ego. It is about understanding that there is more to us than our ego.
Maybe meditation is a better answer for the vast majority. I'm extremely open to that idea, and in different times and places I find myself advocating its practice.Typist wrote:My comments are about the human condition. A fundamental shift in consciousness is not in the cards for the vast majority of us. Again, the example of the Olympic athlete comes to mind.
But I am on a philosophy forum now, a place where people write emails to each other about ideas. Why would I keep talking meditation when it can't be talked about anyway?
All people are thinkers, to a greater or lesser extent. Philosophers are the athletes of thought, the real talents, and this forum is their gymnasium. I know what I discuss here is not at all realistic for most people, but it is realistic for many of the people who meet here.
It is admirable that you are so concerned for the others. But you wouldn't go to the Pete Sampras tennis academy and start saying 'it is a fact of the human condition that 99.9% will never serve as well as you are showing. Shouldn't we teach something a bit more attainable?'
I think there are two themes that keep showing up, and are probably best stuck to
1) You seem to think that thinking is a problem - something to free ourselves from, or perhaps 'turn down' in volume. I say that you are confusing a common spiritual teaching with the reality it tries to point to. This is why you seem so keen to get everyone meditating, whereas I find myself only advocating meditation to certain people.
2) You also seem to think egoism is some kind of negative state that needs to be shed. I say that we will never shed our egos, but we can complement it with a more rounded understanding of who we really are.
I feel like I'm having to steer you away from a 'this teaching is better/more practical than that teaching debate', when I don't recognise any conflict between the spiritual merits of thinking and meditation. However much I try to reassure you that I am all for teaching meditation (although not on a philosophy discussion board) you don't seem to hear me. i can't argue against meditation, I am 100% all for it, but you can't talk about it here.
The nature of ego and the nature of thought are, however, two big themes in philosophy, both east and west. Why not do what we are here to do - a little bit of philosophical yoga? If you find that prospect difficult, because it is to indulge shamelessly in what you think is so harmful then we will know it from your presence or your absence.
Best wishes, Nikolai