Hey all.
I’ve been away from reddit for a while. I’ve been busy being pretty immersed in my experiences. I was having a lot of social interactions and I find that nothing else has quite the magnetic pull that they do, especially intense and emotional ones, and I got pretty well sucked into them. So I spent the last few months thinking primarily about my job (which underwent big changes), my hobbies (which are quite illuminating and exciting to me but can also be truly superficial), my relationships (which also were shaken up recently), politics (one human being has 150 billion dollars and I don’t have healthcare - that’s probably not okay), etc. I experienced a lot of anxiety and found a lot of subtle and passive hindrances that I’d been blind to during these last few months. But I also learned a lot about what makes me happy, calm, mindful, and mindless. I’ve undoubtedly spent a lot of time with truly meaningless and mindless things and have spent virtually no time actively practicing wisdom. This is not my first experience with a period like this and I have no good reason to believe it will be my last.
Recently, obviously, being here writing this, I’ve begun to return to a place of contemplation and meditation and, looking back on the last few months, I have a lot to learn and investigate and unpack. It’s like I was acting out a film, and now I’ve taken the role of film critic, except my goal is less about analyzing the content of film and more about deducing the nature of film and video from the footage available.
First on that list of things to analyze is a lingering anxiety about how easily I slipped into a state of very minimal contemplation and meditation and of worldly absorption. I didn’t so much as decide to spend a long while lost in convention as I did simply not resist sliding quickly into it. I find that prolonged periods of introspection and practice exhaust me in one way, and immersive ‘humaning’ exhausts me in a different way, and the last decade has been my bouncing between them for periods of anywhere from a few months to a few years at a time.
Does anyone else experience this? Am I a puny spiritual weakling who cannot resist the temptation to become a mindless drone for more than a year at a time? Do these experiences happen on a different time scale for you? Have you developed techniques to deal with this? Do you consider spending some time mindless (as in, the antonym of mindful or aware) important or even vital to understanding reality? Or is it a sign or failure instead, and a waste of time or even detrimental? Or is it all about the way you spend such time?
And really I’d just be happy to get an update from everyone on what the water’s like for them right now. Just dump some thoughts on me, especially u/nefandi, u/triumphantgeorge, and u/aesiranatman, but everyone else too.
Edit: I apologize if any of my wording here is careless. I trust most of you to be clever enough not to be mistaken by it. I’m a bit like a sleepy cat just woken up in the morning. I’ll need a moment to regain my sharpness.
What’s up Utthana? Long time no read. :)
Mundanity can sometimes make me temporarily overlook what I know, but not much and not for long.
It’s spiritually dangerous, I think, to compare oneself to someone else. Setting aside the fact that there is no way to know where one subjectivity is relative another, even if you did know something like that, how would it help? It would only continue taking you outside your own perspective instead of allowing you to master your own perspective. Of course conventional mentality is to know oneself through what one imagines “the other” knows about oneself, which is the socially constructed identity of “I am who I and the others say I am.” I can have a socially constructed identity for myself even inside my own dream. It’s basically like playing a certain kind of game with myself.
As I see it, in order not to get lost, you’d have to shift your center of spiritual (intellectual + emotional) gravity into yourself first and the sense then would be that you live inside yourself and what you’d refer to as “the universe” also lives inside you as your dream. You’d have to take yourself as the center and live like that in a lifestyle where all the life “things” come out and go back to you at all times. So you’re not the one who goes out (into the world) and comes back (into your home away from the world). You’re staying. You’re stationary. You’re the eternal place. The world comes in and out. When the world comes in, it’s your guest. When the world goes out, you’re the absolute sovereign of your own solitude. This must be an unbending commitment such that even if you don’t think about it, you feel like it’s true all the time such that if someone asks you about it, you’d say, “yea, that’s right, that’s how it is, it is true.”
Then even if you do things which some might consider mundane, you’ll never ever become mundane yourself. The things of the world will never confuse you once you start living inside yourself instead of inside a universe of some sort. Let the universe live in you.
But, I also think it’s a slow process and it cannot be rushed because one has to enter into this process in a sincere and genuine way, which can only happen subjectively whenever one is ready.
In any case, I don’t think it helps to freak out, as long as you know what it is you value. If you get confused about your value ladder, what is most important in your life and what is less important, then there might be some trouble. As long as you know you value this beyond-conventional truth of your own being above all else, how can there be anything bigger than simply the smallest possible degree of confusion?
Your will is the law, ultimately. If you know what you’re about, all else is certain and the way is broad and stable. And the cool thing is, no one knows if you know what you’re about. So if you say you know what you’re about I just have to take your word for it, if I want to trust you. If I don’t want to trust you, you cannot prove it to me. The point is, it’s something sacred between you and you and no one can stick their nose in that for you. Even if you solicit advice, it is still only up to you to determine which meaning fits where inside your own mindset. So even if you solicited advice, even then, no one could stick their nose into your mindset. People always have to be either consciously or unconsciously invited in to participate. So once you grab hold of your secrets, everything becomes secure and simple. You can rest inside yourself with confidence so that if you do anything, it is done well, and if you avoid doing, you rest well. That’s excellence in both action and rest. What else is there? This kind of excellence only you can know. Once you know it, you cannot verify it.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2018-07-22 14:41:25 (e2tfl01)
Great points as always.
To be clear, at no point during this whole experience did I ever lose any fundamental knowledge or vital wisdom. You could have grabbed me at any random and mundane moment and barked, “What is the nature of reality?” Or, “Who are you?” and my answer would’ve been no different than my answer right now.
Instead, I simply carry on with my human life as though I don’t know any of that. So it’s an important distinction, that the knowledge itself is not lost, and on a purely academic level, neither is the urgency or weight of that knowledge, and yet its place among my daily thoughts and actions and its power to inform my behavior waned substantially.
It’s almost like falling back into an earlier stage of my spiritual development in which I was prone to complaining that I understood things intellectually but didn’t feel them. Now, of course, those truths have become so deeply rooted that I have no such issue, and yet I’ve just spent a few months allowing that visceral ‘feeling’ of wisdom - the thing that spurs real action and practice - to fade away.
So, if I’ve explained myself well, you’ll understand that my concern is one of something like discipline or consistency in the application and furthering of wisdom as opposed to any existential fear.
So my fear is not becoming mundane myself - that seems literally impossible, though becoming 99% mundane seems like a non-zero possibility albeit very unlikely anytime soon.
Originally commented by u/Utthana on 2018-07-22 18:55:54 (e2tnwqv)
It’s a matter of habit and utility. I think having some practice may help here to change the habit. I either cast spells or honor and remember the old spells in a mini-ritual nearly daily. I also rest the body in healing attention and intention with and without the “fancy” visualizations. So with habits like that, there is no way for me to act “normal.” On the other hand, even these activities can also become normal. Normality is not something that one should be inherently scared of.
Basically it comes down to: am I living a life I want to live? If not, can I add whatever is missing right now? If not, can I take one step in that direction? If not, why not? Usually I can at least take a step. If for some reason I didn’t know what step to take, I’d contemplate what my step could be and figure it out.
In general resting in many kinds of different mental states or using them in a more active manner is something that happens often as a matter of habit and life utility. So for example, if something itches or I feel some slight pain, I know what to do. If I want some circumstance to lean a certain way, I know what to do. I can eat my food as “normal” or I can “bless” it first before eating it. I can poop on the pot as normal, or I can take that time to relax the body deeper than would have been normal. I can take a shower as usual, or I can use the healing water visualization. There are countless such opportunities.
Originally commented by u/mindseal on 2018-07-22 22:46:03 (e2tu9q0)
I am learning a lesson in the value of small, quiet, daily life rituals.
Thank you.
Originally commented by u/Utthana on 2018-07-23 02:20:48 (e2u56wd)