Anthony66 wrote: ↑Fri Sep 30, 2022 2:31 pm
One would need to clearly define what we mean by "think" here. The mystic with years of meditative experience would claim that he reaches states of
pure stillness and serenity, devoid of thinking. I have had glimpses of this state through my meditative practice. Certainly one can look back and bring to memory such as experiences and describe it using the mechanism of thinking. But it would seem that in the moment,
thinking can cease.
Yes, this defining proves to be quite tricky. Federica and Ashvin gave great examples.
Let's try to approach matters from yet another angle - let's try less philosophical and more experiential perspective. When we introspect I guess most people would agree that we feel thoughts as something relatively
small contained into something
large. In other words, we vaguely feel that container we call consciousness which is like a
field of experience and thoughts are only tiny ripples in that field. This is a very common metaphor and one which is quite easy to intuit.
Now the idea is that all these thought-ripples consume all our attention and we completely lose awareness of the field. For this reason it is almost the default understanding that meditation's goal is to diffuse all the ripples so that awareness can expand into the whole field, which is experienced as
pure stillness devoid of thinking - we can say that
thinking ceases. And this is the important point for which you say
"One would need to clearly define what we mean by "think" here." Indeed, the successions of ripples (thought trains) cease. Not only in Eastern meditation but also in Western. The difference is how this is accomplished and even more importantly - how we proceed from there.
If we choose to reach the sea of serenity by diffusing our thought-ripples, we don't enter head on combat with them. We’ll quickly be overwhelmed. Instead, we step back and try to simply observe thoughts detachedly. We allow the trains of thought to pass through but we don’t engage with them. With much practice we learn not to be distracted at all by these thoughts. It’s much like in life when there’s this annoying kid that constantly teases us, the more we react and fight back, the more it continues. Instead, when we show that we’re not moved at all by its insults, it gradually loses interest and goes somewhere else. This is the basic method of diffusing thoughts. We simply detach from them and show that we’re not interested in their games. Then gradually the thought trains subside and we find ourselves in the sea of serenity.
Contrast this with the method of meditation which has evolved in the last two millennia. Here we don’t push away thoughts as some illusionary and annoying phenomena. Instead, we cultivate the strength to form a thought of our own making, place it in the center of our consciousness and let go of the rest. We don’t try to control the whole world. We control only a single thought-image (and it's immediate feeling context) but we do it well. The most various sensations, memories, automatic thoughts, etc. try to distract us but our spiritual activity stays focused as a laser. Gradually we once again find ourselves in the sea of serenity but with a great difference - we’re fully self-conscious of our spiritual activity because we never pushed it away. We mastered a certain aspect of it. Feel the difference: in the first case we let go of the thoughts and hopefully they leave us alone and serene, in the second we master the flow of thoughts and simply control them into a point (thus the sea around the point becomes apparent).
Now we arrive at the question of higher order spiritual activity (which often is termed Thinking here but in more precise terms we speak of degrees - Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition). The thing is that these higher order degrees are not simply more clever and faster intellectual thinking, which indeed ceases. We’ll never grasp this unless we try to feel the
hierarchical depth of our spiritual activity. We can attempt to approach this if we extend the metaphor in the following way.
So in both cases we can reach the sea of serenity. There are no more trains of ripples to distract us - thinking ceases. For the Oriental mystic this also marks the highest achievement - pure consciousness. One merges with the field. But remember that this is achieved at the
expense of giving away our self-conscious spiritual activity. Now imagine that this sea of serenity is not completely homogenous but there are certain tidal waves. The field pulsates, cycles through colors, but does that in a very smooth, serene way. We’re only experiencing this. Later we can symbolize all this with ripple-thoughts, we can say words as “My consciousness expanded into the Cosmos, everything was One and pulsated smoothly, cycled through colors.” Eugene would say that this is what spiritual sciences misses - it is actual ‘experiencing’, no thought ripples, which are only like fractal fragments - self-similar to but of lower order compared to the pulsating One consciousness. Note that there’s no notion of spiritual activity in this state - there’s no willing of anything - be it body or waves in the fields. We’re simply riding the pulses of Schop’s blind will - it does the pulsing, and there’s only ‘experiencing’ of them.
Contrast this with the second approach. When we reach the sea of serenity while keeping a fully awake focus of our spiritual activity something very peculiar happens. We begin to sense that our spiritual activity has levels, fractal layers. In our ordinary state through our meaningful intents we create thought-ripples. It’s like our spirit is the wind and it makes ripples on the sea. When we gain fully conscious control over this blowing of ripples, we come to know that the ripples are only certain forms at a certain level of the fractal. We find out that our wind can blow in a much more holistic way and then we find ourselves responsible for some of the tidal waves, some of the color pulses. This kind of blowing is at a different ‘scale’. Of course this is only a way to symbolize these things, the forms of spiritual activity don’t differ simply by spatial scale. It’ll take us too far to go into details but many things change as we move through the fractal levels. A rich topic for meditation is music. Music is not simply the sum total of sounds. Rhythm, melody, harmony - these things are completely new spiritual phenomena extended in time. They are higher fractal levels. Similarly, higher cognition is not simply the sum total of thought-ripples - it leads us to formerly inconceivable forms of spiritual activity that weave through the Cosmos and are responsible for everything in the dreamscape.
I hope this makes it clearer. The key point is that simply diffusing our spiritual activity can lead us at most to the sea of serenity that we simply ‘experience’. We can never go further than this - and how could we, when we have forsaken all ‘going’. On the other hand, by overcoming the intellectual chaos by mastering the thinking forces such that we can focus them at will, at a point, as a laser beam, we once again attain to the sea of serenity but now we’re also fully awake and find the higher fractal level of activity which moves the tidal waves. For the mystic these waves are simply the inexplicable nature of the One consciousness but for us they proceed from the fully conscious spiritual activity of the most varied beings.
As a last note I would like to point out that the sea of serenity doesn’t mean laminar featurelessness. This may indeed be the case for the mystic but when we enter these states with our lucid spiritual activity we also understand how our ordinary thought-ripples are embedded in the higher order waves. The feeling for serenity comes from the fact that we flow through these higher order streams (which can be highly dynamic by the way) but at the same time these streams are filled with exquisite details, as if we grasp the meaningful density of a whole book. This is not something to satisfy our intellectual curiosity. Actually what we initially behold in this way is first and foremost the structure of our own being, the waves of our ideas, sympathies, antipathies, beliefs, etc. yet not as some psychoanalytical categories but as actual living flows in the deeper soul world. Our ordinary consciousness simply ripples on the surface of all this.