Open-Secrets

Tag: enlightenment

  • Death Wish: A Meditation Dream

    Death Wish: A Meditation Dream

    Go ahead, make my day…

    The gun didn’t scare me, nor did the guy holding it that was going to kill me. In fact, I was intrigued, curious to the nth degree – what would death be like? What would I experience? Would I experience? Who would experience, if there was experience? If there was experience, would there be a transition from one state of awareness and consciousness to another?

    I leaned into the gun until the muzzle was touching my forehead – directly at the third eye. “Go ahead,” I invited. I relaxed and centered my focus and  on simple being – breathe grasshopper…

    Did the gun fire? Is my body dead while my awareness/consciousness remains? If death was instantaneous, I probably wouldn’t have registered the event. “What’s my experience now?,” goes through my head(?), mind(?), consciousness(?).

    “If my brain is dead,” I think(?), “then I probably wouldn’t be thinking like this.” What would the experience be?

    My state is suddenly much more subtle – not so much heavy self-reflective thinking, more like deep, relaxed meditation. I recognize this state and am aware that if grasped at, it will disappear. Relaxing more (who/what relaxes?), the state envelopes me(?) more – absorbs me(?) – just the state now. A self-aware state. No where to go, no where to be – a simple experience, complete in itself.

    “Wait a sec,” I think(?) “What about all those different planes/dimensions of existence that many spiritual traditions speak of?”

    I realize that I am dreaming and have the freedom to explore possibilities beyond the limits of waking life. I head out for the far country where I can be many, any I(s). Where living, dying, flying and enlightenment are possibilities.

    I wake up on Easter Sunday, I’m a year older. Now there is a miracle – overnight, I aged a year!

  • Mind Tripping in the Mental Maze

    Mind Tripping in the Mental Maze

    Adventures in neuroscience mental coding – mindfulness

    In my last post, I gave a very brief introduction to our mind’s use of object relations as a way of storing and processing information. The mind is very useful, but as they say – the mind is a good servant, but a lousy master. The mind is perfect for what it does – record, recall, compare and extrapolate data, but there are a few flies in our mental ointment:

    1. Buddha's BrainThe brain body/mind starts receiving and recording impressions long before we take our first breath. For months after that first breath, our nervous system, physical body and psyche are still an undifferentiated system.
    2. We are born into this world as extremely sensitive and impressionable beings., which results in very powerful imprinting on the body/mind/soul. From about 5 years of age on, our sensitivity wanes and new impressions carry less and less of emotional/body charge which lessens the creation of deep, lasting impressions (except in the case of trauma).
    3. As an organism, we are hardwired for survival. The brain’s evolution is skewed to give instantaneous attention to negative perceptions to support our fight or flight response. This helps to establish veils of perception that are skewed more toward the “negative” than the positive and sets in motion inertia of constant mental activity – chatter, chatter, chatter.
    4. Our parents and holding environment bombard us with a constant stream of thoughts, sensations and emotions that had little connection to or alignment with our sublime spiritual nature – we are objectified long before we are born and are seen as just another thing, albeit a living entity thing.

    So, we wind up with a voice in our head that chatters all the time, which might not be so bad if we were constantly chanting the sacred. But, even this would suffer from our early conditioning because by the time we start seeking the real, we are an entity identity operating system with bloated, outdated, suboptimal, looping code that makes Windows look lean, mean and full of dazzling light.

    A few excerpts from Buddha’s Brain by Rick Hanson:

    • buddha mind brain neuroscienceThe bias of the brain tilts implicit memories in a negative direction, even when most of your experiences are actually positive.
    • The brain is designed to change through experiences, especially negative ones; we learn from our experiences, particularly those that happened during childhood, and it is natural for that learning to stick with us.
    • A toddler has about three times as many synapses as an adult; on the way to adulthood, adolescents can lose up to 10,000 synapses per second in the prefrontal cortex.
    • Emotional arousal facilitates learning by increasing neural excitation and consolidating synaptic change.
    • Given the negativity bias of the brain, it takes an active effort to internalize positive experiences and heal negative ones.
    • Because of all the ways your brain changes its structure, your experience matters beyond its momentary, subjective impact. It makes enduring changes in the physical tissues of your brain which affect your well-being, functioning, and relationships. Based on science, this is a fundamental reason for being kind to yourself, cultivating wholesome experiences, and taking them in.
    • Focus on your emotions and body sensations, since these are the essence of implicit memory. Let the experience fill your body and be as intense as possible.
    • …most of the shaping of your mind remains forever unconscious. This is called implicit memory, and it includes your expectations, models of relationships, emotional tendencies, and general outlook. Implicit memory establishes the interior landscape of your mind— what it feels like to be you— based on the slowly accumulating residues of lived experience.
    • Only we humans worry about the future, regret the past, and blame ourselves for the present. We get frustrated when we can’t have what we want, and disappointed when what we like ends. We suffer that we suffer. We get upset about being in pain, angry about dying, sad about waking up sad yet another day. This kind of suffering— which encompasses most of our unhappiness and dissatisfaction— is constructed by the brain. It is made up.
    The discoveries being made in neuroscience are bringing new insights into ancient spiritual practices and psychodynamics. This knowledge can be supportive and assist us in deepening our spiritual practice and movement toward realization and enlightenment. Understanding the mechanics of how the brain filters and assimilates perception  into our subjective reality of self and the world affords us with more opportunity for precise and powerful practice that is more being and less doing.

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  • The Neuroscience of Enlightenment

    Is Neuroscience Unlocking the Doors to the Kingdom?

    neuroscience enlightenmentIs this a great time to be alive or what? Who is thinking this question? How is this sense of self generated? Are the thoughts of this self simply habits triggered by cues? How does the brain and all of those synaptic processes create an external and internal reality?

    Ah, questions! Are there really any answers? Have you read these four books?

    Each of these books use information and insight from neuroscience and what we are learning about the brain, cognition and perception to open our eyes to who/what/when we/reality really is – or they at least give us a very interesting lens to look at enlightenment & awareness through.

    Reading these books and the accumulated affect of them on my consciousness reminds me of “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson.

    Here’s a quote from The Ego Tunnel:

    Presence is a necessary condition for the conscious experience. If the brain could solve the One-World Problem but not the Now Problem, a world could not appear to you. In a deep sense, appearance is simply presence, and the subjective sense of temporal immediacy is the definition of an internal space of time.

    Is it possible to transcend this subjective Now-ness, to escape the tunnel of presence?

    Is that great, or what?

    The debate over whether we are just a bunch of chemical & electrical reactions in the brain vs. are we something more subtle and eternal outside of space and time continues. For me, these books have just made things more exciting and mysterious – and that book on habit is actually a great owner’s manual on how to make those changes you always wished you could.

    The Evolution of Consciousness & Enlightenment

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  • What happens when ego is matabolized?

    What is the agent of transformation?

    I’ve often wondered how the inner experience of oneself changes with the transformation of ego identity and structure. I know how my life is freer and more fluid from the years of work and exploration, but I still have a very active subjective inner life with habitual mental activity, concerns and attitudes, old patterns, and historic identities.

    I found this reflection by A. H. Almaas on his experience to be very poignant and instructional.

  • The Fulcrum

    Resolving the Paradox of Being vs. Non-Being

    the-fulcrum---dual---non-dualThe annual retreat for the Ridhwan School focused on The Fulcrum, a term A.H. Almaas used to explore the point or interface where one’s consciousness can hold being and non-being (duality & the non-dual). A couple of central question for the retreat were – What is the interplay between these two views of reality? and What is the connection between spiritual practice and enlightenment?

    Here is the list of topics for the 16 sessions:

    • Continual Practice
    • Enlightenment Drive
    • Motiveless Practice
    • Practice to No End
    • Opening Time & Space
    • Uncaused Realization
    • Non-Self Centered Practice
    • Organ of Realization
    • Paradox of Non-Doing
    • Mystery of Emptiness
    • Realization & Delusion
    • Living Inquiry
    • Living Dialectics
    • Not One, Not Two
    • Freedom

    Items of Interest

    Links of Interest

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  • Spiritual Liberation

    Is All the Fuss About Spiritual Liberation Really Necessary?

    spiritual_liberation_freedomSpiritual liberation, spiritual freedom, enlightenment, the spiritual journey – I see and hear references to these terms all the time. What is it that is being sought?

    Being liberated means there is no clinging to anything; there is no worry, no concern, no heaviness. The mind is not fixated, focused or bound to any particular content; you are aware of whatever arises in the mind, without effort, without even trying to be aware. – A.H. Almaas

    Does this mean we all just want to relax and be worry free? In a way yes, but perhaps there is more to the story.

    What is it that keeps us stressed, uptight, reactive, fixated and un-liberated? In the greatest of all ironies – it is the very thing seeking spiritual liberation that perpetuates the state of suffering – it is us, our identification with something less than liberation.

    The agitation and suffering that results from our lack of spiritual liberation keeps us seeking liberation – which is often imagined as a state of living free from sadness, difficulties, economic downturns, bursting real estate bubbles and the like. Quite preposterous if we really think about it.

    Whether you are happy or sad, whether a person is there with you or not, none of these things seem important. For the moment you are completely free from all the concerns in your life. This state can never be achieved by striving for it. It will just happen one day, and if you notice it you won’t think it’s a big deal. You’ll go on eating your dinner or whatever you are doing. The moment it becomes a big deal, it’s gone.  – A.H. Almaas

    It’s quite the conundrum. If we do nothing, it seems like we will remain where we are, right?

    The old adage – If we continue doing what we have always done, we’ll continue getting the same results.

    Again it’s not so much what you do as who/what does. Getting to the point of understanding this often takes some doing for most of us – which obviously delays spiritual liberation.

    Links of Interest

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    Items of Interest

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