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Post by Deleted on May 15, 2023 11:24:23 GMT
I have experienced the void and the great nothingness in meditation. It was an annihilating experience. There was a feeling of loneliness that was unimaginable. The state of emptiness or nothingness exists if there is no creation - it is the most utterly dismal sense of being alone. Also stillness. Life however, is not still and, therefore, there is life. I was struck by the simple truth that creation fills the void.
It dawned on me that we also individually create life. It is not the material things but the love and relationships we create that give our life meaning. It is how we move away from the nothingness and create joy. And that is all that matters. While these relationships exist, we can escape the void and the sense of being alone. So, we are part of the creative force and create life in myriad forms. Like the creator, we too fill the void in a way that is ever expansive.
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Post by Ava on May 15, 2023 20:34:15 GMT
That's lovely @astrokeen. I think this lines up with what you were saying, a little bit: I've watched many people talking about their NDEs. It's common for them to experience a sense of expansion, sometimes radical expansion, like starting to fill up the galaxy. I keep that in mind sometimes when I get tired of how complex people are. Why shouldn't we be, if we're so huge? There's a lot to us.
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Post by Deleted on May 15, 2023 20:50:50 GMT
Ava , a sense of expansion can be experienced in meditation. I have felt it as a positive thing - feeling light, weightless and without boundaries, capable of filling any available space. One usually emerges feeing energised and very peaceful. The feeling of the void which accompanies ego-death (I have mentioned this before) is not so pleasant. I have consulted others and been told that had I persisted in entering the space of emptiness, I would have found that it dissolves in one feeling omniscient. Ah well, the initial step into the void was so shocking to the system that I withdrew from it. But came away with the urgent sense that our relationships with family members and others were something we needed to prize. It later dawned on me that these relationships were an expression of our creative force and 'real' as they could be. Yes, indeed, we are complex.
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Post by Ava on May 17, 2023 13:19:23 GMT
Thank you again @astrokeen .
With our current social norms being what they are, I find it difficult to deepen real-life relationships outside my immediate circle. In my dreams lately I'm often immersed within a healing community where everyone is healed, pure, mutually supportive. There are no walls. The male energy is particularly strong and healing, because there is so much integrity preventing ulterior motives when it comes to direct, healing touch. Hard to describe this, but it's my energetic template for an ideal community, no matter how small.
I'm attempting to finish this book again: In Love with the World, A Monk's Journey through the Bardos of Living and Dying by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. I dislike the scrambled chronology of the book, a modern type of format that always annoys me. I blame the ghost writer and publisher more than the author.
Anyway I think the title says so much about spiritual mastery and its result: one will be in love with the world. Chapter nine is called "Emptiness, Not Nothingness" and the author talks about the void. He says, "Unless we have developed some understanding of the many different aspects of the mind, glimpses of emptiness are not necessarily of benefit and can sometimes create perplexity." Then he talks about a woman who felt she spontaneously "disappeared" at the beach one day, and whenever she thought of it afterwards, she was terrified, because she felt she'd temporarily lost her mind. Only later after she began meditating could she return to that same feeling and understand the context, and work with it.
For me, for now, I think I've only confronted such total emptiness in dreams, once when I was being tortured to death, crying out in vain for God or the Universe to rescue me, and hearing nothing at all in response, and another time when I seemed to encounter an alien intelligence. It wasn't scary deliberately but by virtue of being so totally foreign in psychological presentation, I was completely disorientated. Nothing was grounded.
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Post by Deleted on May 17, 2023 19:10:30 GMT
Ava , your dreams seem very intuitive and wonderful. You are able to access states which people encounter through meditation. Yes, one of the painful things about the void was realising that there was no one taking note. If I drifted into it and got lost, no one would care. What a shocking realisation. It went against everything one had believed about the universe and the spirit. But I am assured that this viewpoint belongs to the ego - which one has to let go of. Well, unless one is ready and gets to that point, it is all one has and it cannot be denied. So, from my viewpoint, if there is no creator and the ultimate reality is emptiness, our lives are also empty. There is no meaning to wealth, acquisitions, qualifications and anything we take great pride in. What is meaningful is the love and joy we share with people in our lives such as our partners and children. I recall daydreaming of aliens as a child. In those days there was no TV or talk of aliens but I imagined that this world was contained in a glass bowl being observed by giant beings. This was a recurrent thought and weird in a small child. I can only think it was intuition. I got the sense that we were an experiment.
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Post by Ava on Jun 2, 2023 12:41:19 GMT
Ava , your dreams seem very intuitive and wonderful. You are able to access states which people encounter through meditation. Thank you. I don't feel like I deserve good dreams or access to higher states but nevertheless things do happen. As for higher states, I've described two experiences in the Angel and Om threads. There is no meaning to wealth, acquisitions, qualifications and anything we take great pride in. What is meaningful is the love and joy we share with people in our lives such as our partners and children. I see a lot of truth in this. I still wonder about everything. 'Just bumped into these two quotes yesterday. The first is sad but makes me laugh. I recognize myself in this, the grabbing for answers everywhere: "Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.”― Charles Bukowski, Women And the second takes on the same issue of meaninglessness but goes deeper: "Of course there is nothing new in this predicament of discovering that ideas and words cannot plumb the ultimate mystery of life, that Reality or, if you will, God cannot be comprehended by the finite mind. The only novelty is that the predicament is now social rather than individual; it is widely felt, not confined to the few. Almost every spiritual tradition recognizes that a point comes when two things must happen: man must surrender his separate feeling "I," and must face the fact that he cannot know, that is, define the ultimate."- Alan Watts, The Age of Insecurity I think enlightenment is real though; it's evident in genius and strong love and beautiful art, for example. A higher vibration shaping lives and legacies. I recall daydreaming of aliens as a child. In those days there was no TV or talk of aliens but I imagined that this world was contained in a glass bowl being observed by giant beings. This was a recurrent thought and weird in a small child. I can only think it was intuition. I got the sense that we were an experiment. Maybe that's true! A lot of people talk of giant beings in their near death experiences. Angels like skyscrapers. Who knows.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 2, 2023 15:09:32 GMT
Ava , I love the 1st quote. So funny! There seem to be two contradictory beliefs - the belief that our thinking and feelings evolve from one lifetime to another, so that, for example, we learn about compassion and becoming more tolerant of difference. Or we learn to develop a sense of self-worth and expect to be valued in relationships. But where does this belief fit in with the notion that all life is transitory and a veil of illusion over the great reality of emptiness? So ,what is the worth of our lessons and learnings? Unless our evolving psyche is leading us to a great encounter with the void. The 2nd quote said that we learn to surrender a separate feeling of "I" but I think it is also important to note that this means 'I' is not inconsequential rather the individual 'I' is no different from the great intelligence of consciousness that is. There is nothing lost in surrendering the "I". This is what I have gathered from reading of experiences of non-duality. It is all a big mystery. Edit: Just read this somewhere which helps to resolve the contradiction - "Wisdom helps you experience the dream lucidly, without suffering."
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Post by Ava on Jun 3, 2023 14:06:56 GMT
Great points @astrokeen , Reincarnation does bring up a lot of questions. It seems we're meant to evolve towards awareness and refined perceptions of truth...and love and compassion seem to be central to the truth. I for one think a lot about regret. This a theme of NDEs, where a person viscerally experiences the pain they have inflicted on others. I wonder why that is such a theme except in a regular life, we tend to be emotionally blunted. It seems plausible we're meant to learn how to walk without harming people, but I do consider that impossible. I can't control what someone else is triggered by. People can take offense at anything. So that's the kind of question I hope to gain more clarity about eventually. I do love the idea that someone or something is omniscient and holds answers. Maybe God will explain, or the Akashic records; or maybe answers always come piecemeal from different sources. I completely agree with what you wrote about the 2nd quote. Well I'm enjoying Alan Watts' book as an exploration of these themes and feel like quoting more. For instance, this goes along with the Bukowski quote: "Consequently our age is one of frustration, anxiety, agitation, and addiction to 'dope.' Somehow we must grab what we can while we can, and drown out the realization that the whole thing is futile and meaningless. This 'dope' we call our high standard of living, a violent and complex stimulation of the senses, which makes them progressively less sensitive and thus in need of yet more violent stimulation. We crave distraction -- a panorama of sights, sounds, thrills, and titillations into which as much as possible must be crowded into the shortest period of time.
To keep up this 'standard' most of use are willing to put up with lives that consist largely in doing jobs that are a bore, earning the means to seek relief from the tedium by intervals of hectic and expensive pleasure. These intervals are supposed to be real living, the real purpose served by the necessary evil of work....
This is no caricature. It is the simple reality of millions of lives, so commonplace that we need hardly dwell upon the details, save to note the anxiety and frustration of those who put up with it, not knowing what else to do." It's all pretty common sense and obvious but makes me laugh to see it spelled out that way. He goes on to address this question about how to live in what may seem to be a void. Zen stuff, or "living the question," as Rilke said. I love that quote about wisdom, thank you. I really like quotes, as you can see.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 3, 2023 17:45:01 GMT
Great quotes from you too, thanks Ava .
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