ScottRoberts wrote: ↑Mon Oct 16, 2023 8:09 pm
Lou Gold wrote: ↑Mon Oct 16, 2023 12:00 pm
Probably outside the conversational flow I offer my two cents that you've never been able to concentrate because you are attempting to concentrate on reason when you need to concentrate on faith. Without faith you will not recognize Grace. You'll pass it by without noticing or think that nothing is happening.
I don't think so. What I (try to) concentrate on is vowel sounds, or moving a point of light in a circle, or a pin.... Reasoning is a distraction (one of many).
Scott,
If I remember correctly, you are quite astute with mathematical thinking, so it somewhat surprises me the concentration is so difficult for you (although I do remember you had mentioned it before). Have you worked with the mathematical transformations that Cleric has suggested elsewhere, i.e. starting with a concentration on mathematical objects and then releasing the images to penetrate to the underlying thinking-gestures? The other thing is that, when we have difficulty concentrating, we should remember this is presenting us with a great opportunity to become conscious, however slightly, of underlying soul currents that push and pull our life of thinking. That is
always happening, but now the meditation makes it more clear what is happening underneath the hood. We can try to notice patterns of thoughts and feeling that seem to frequently emerge and distract us from the meditation.
We should also keep in mind that the fruits of meditation are often not manifested during the meditation itself, but more during the course of our life in between meditations. It expresses as a gradual clarity of insight into our lives and the broad structure of the reality we are engaging. Even if we experience some living images, this may embed a whole series of transformations that we are yet to go through and therefore will have little meaning for us at first. For ex., if you can read through some of Cleric's lengthy posts here and follow their reasoning closely, then your intuitive orientation is already deepened more than most people. Even more than meditation, I am starting to get the sense that the sort of exercises he mentioned in the latest essay that Federica linked - the rhythmically zooming out to the intuitive context and zooming in to particular aspects of it - may be the most helpful thing to practice on a daily basis. Of course, if we can do both that is ideal, but if we have to focus on one or the other for a time, I would say to start with the latter.
Cleric wrote:The totality of perceptual phenomena is relatively easy to grasp. Here’s a simple exercise to exemplify this. We can observe the way we move our focus through the forms in our visual field. But we can also try to ‘zoom out’ from any particular form and try to expand our focus and include as much as possible also of our peripheral vision, such that our whole visual field feels like a holistic picture. Now we can try to zoom even further out, while trying to include all other senses in this perceptual panorama – hearing, touch, smell, taste, warmth and so on. Then we can also include our emotional state and finally we can include even the awareness that we’re doing this particular exercise. This is an easy and pleasant exercise and with little practice we’ll become so familiar with this expanded state of attention that we'll be able to move into it in one go, without having to build it up gradually.
...
Take a look at your current environment. If you are in a room, there will be many perceptions that you can focus your sight on – furniture, things on the desk, the computer screen, keyboard and so on. Try to find something in your visual field that you don’t know what it is. Not that easy, is it? Almost everything we perceive in our room, even if we don’t specifically think about it, even by just glancing over it, feels as something familiar. Try moving your gaze sequentially through several objects in your room. Try to resist thinking about them, don’t even search for their words. If we are observant, we’ll notice that even though we don’t seek the clearcut concept for the object, it still feels as if we know what we’re looking at. Then if needed we can focus on the concept, for example by anchoring its meaning to the word for the object. But would we say that the perception felt as some mysterious unknown up until we pronounced its word? Or is it rather that at the moment our gaze falls on the perception, on some more ‘blurry’ cognitive level we already have some general awareness of what we’re seeing, and bringing up the concept and word for the perception is similar to concentrating that general awareness into focus?
We usually don’t pay attention to our inner life in such details because most of it unfolds quite automatically.
...
Instead, every perception is also associated with temporal knowing, which is our understanding of how things function and how they are used. For example, when we see a chair, we don’t simply have static awareness of what a chair is but within that awareness we also have the potential for interaction with the object. We know that we can move towards the chair and sit on it. In this way our perceptual field is also a kind of palette for the possible actions we can undertake.
...
Let’s try for a moment to expand and feel the vast intuitive understanding and skills that have been developed throughout our life. Think about the different periods of our life and how each has contributed to what we are now. Think about all the physical and mental skills that have been developed, all that has been read, seen, learned. We can feel this only in a very nebulous way, only as background potential. Now let’s encompass the room we’re in with our sight. Notice how of the innumerable things that we know about everything, the perceptions of the room act as a kind of filter for our intuitive life. Of all the rooms that we have seen, all the places we have been, the knowing that we now experience has a completely specific timbre, we recognize it as we recognize the voice of a friend. The general intuition that we experience when we behold our room, is unique among the intuitions we would have for all other rooms (including alien dwellings). Then we can focus our gaze on some specific interior detail or object in the room. This further filters our intuition and we now know what the object is.
I know that, when I would first read passages such as above, I would simply follow them with my conceptual thinking and say, 'right right, that makes sense! great, let me keep going...' But as Cleric said, we really need to resist that habit and start
swimming with our thinking through this inner investigation. These can be really powerful exercises to work with on a daily basis. Gradually we may start to feel like our thoughts and perceptions are no longer marching forward one by one, as discrete 'moments' in time, but that we are experiencing the metamorphosis of
durations. As you may know, that was Bergson's term for moments experienced with
temporal thickness. It's like we are carrying the whole past and future of Cosmic evolution with us in our transformations. Much of seemingly complex spiritual science can be understood as simply tracing the ways in which past and future stages of Cosmic evolution are embedded in the layers of our current experience. The whole mystery of the Cosmos is embedded within the layers of our current be-ing, but we need to start with humble exercises and gradually thicken our current intuitive experience out. Indeed, the faith that Lou mentions is critical, but we don't need to adopt it blindly - thickening the layers of our intuitive context will surely inspire it within us.
PS - I know this has strayed off the topic, so we can move any further discussion to Meditation if necessary.