Stranger wrote: ↑Sat Mar 04, 2023 1:21 pmYes, if you make continuous efforts to abide in Oneness, thigs will fall into place naturally, but I still need to make certain choices to steer my activities in the right direction. For me the activities that help are interacting with and helping people and animals in loving and compassionate ways while staying mindful and not slipping into mindless irrelevant chats, and also arts/music as a recreational activity. Not helping is any activity that draws my attention too much from abiding in mindfulness and clarity of Oneness. For example, spending time on youtube listening to news, I try to minimize it just to stay informed but it's usually quite toxic and distracting.Federica wrote: ↑Sat Mar 04, 2023 9:32 am Does that mean that you have no particular recommendations for how to conduct one’s life besides meditation, and that one would simply see Oneness make things fall into place in everyday life if meditation is done right?
What are some examples of those activities you refer to that would help/not help with the spiritual goals (besides monastic life which you said is optional)?
Eugene,
Somewhat related to Federica's question about recommendations, during a recent meditation, I thought of a question I wanted to ask you. It is not at all rhetorical or intended to lead you in a certain direction. Actually I am hoping the resulting answer/discussion will have direct application to my own spiritual practice. Perhaps it will also elucidate some of the differences in our approaches, or perhaps not. The question will take a little bit of introduction.
When we sit down to meditate, I think you agree it is critical to quiet the intellectual voice which is always thinking about things, either sense-based phenomena or abstract conceptual phenomena (including those related to higher spiritual reality). That isn't to say the sensory-conceptual thinking is altogether useless or unhelpful, which I'm sure you also agree, but in a sense the content of that thinking needs to be released over, or entrusted, to the higher worlds so that it may be transmuted and enriched within us through higher ideations.
As an analogy, we could liken our normal thinking life to the instruments of physical therapy after a major injury, like a broken leg (the Fall). We have to endure many weeks or months of exercises for helping the bones to heal and join back together, to build up the surrounding muscle, to regain our orientation for walking, etc. It is a slow, grinding, arduous process with probably many setbacks, and therefore many temptations to simply give up and remain as a cripple. But if we can endure and overcome those temptations, the goal is to start walking again without reliance on the therapy instruments anymore (here analogized to our normal conceptual life). Here is a relevant quote to consider:
Steiner wrote:As long as you build up a scaffolding you remain in the thought customary to you in the physical world... this is related to the full reality not at all like the inner framework of a house to the complete building, but only like the outer scaffolding upon which the builders stand. This has to be taken down again when the building is completed. In the same way the scaffolding of thought has to be taken down again if one wishes to have the truth before one as it really is.
So in meditation, we try to anticipate this future evolutionary state of supra-conceptual thinking by voluntarily sacrificing the outer conceptual scaffolding. Needless to say, this is easier said than done for most people, including myself. And here is where the question comes in. For ex., when I meditate, I may start voicing thoughts like, 'now it's time to sacrifice the outer scaffolding...', and similar thoughts. So there is still an inner split - I am thinking about how I need to release the outer scaffolding to make progress, but in my thinking activity I am still holding on to that outer scaffolding, unwilling to sacrifice it. What I am actually doing with my thinking and what I am thinking about doing are still at cross-purposes. Of course this sort of cross-purpose thinking is always present in our normal waking experience, in one form or another, and meditation simply provides the opportunity to become more conscious of it. The question is, what is your strategy for dealing with this inner contradiction in meditation? I am sure that the releasing comes very natural to you at this stage, but if you can think back to when you had to struggle with it, what methods did you use to sacrifice the conceptual chatter?