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A Dream of Death
Thanks for your comments. I'm not sure I can agree, though, that survival plays a much more important part than reproduction. Maybe I've just been seduced by Dawkins' strong faith in his science and his easy-going writing style - although I can't agree with his current hard-line anti-religious stance, he seems to be going a little too far, despite good intentions - but all that I've read on evolutionary biology (and it wasn't all Dawkins, of course) leads me to believe that most of what we do IS in fact underpinned by the reproductive imperative. It seems counter-intuitive, of course. One assumes, as you've said, that survival should be more integral because a being has to live to sexual maturity and find a mate first. However, it turns out this isn't so. I can't think of an example, I'm unprepared for fully replying... I'll get back to you with one.
Also, while I'm not suggesting that our emotions know our survival is taken care of, was my example of squirrels' winter storage not sufficient? It seemed to me quite a strong example of a creature without human-like higher brain functions having a hard-wired mechanism for "knowing" (on some level) that it has or doesn't have food stored. What I'm trying to get at is, knowing we've got food for the next week doesn't have to depend on intellectual thought or conscious knowledge in the sense that we use. I'll perhaps have to go have a look, see what the science has to say.
Hmm. Not a very good reply really, but I'm just back from work, so I shan't be trawling the internet right now to find support for my arguments. Having said that, taoism really hinges on stopping trawling the internet for information, and instead trawling oneself for truth, so maybe I'll just do that instead.
Also, while I'm not suggesting that our emotions know our survival is taken care of, was my example of squirrels' winter storage not sufficient? It seemed to me quite a strong example of a creature without human-like higher brain functions having a hard-wired mechanism for "knowing" (on some level) that it has or doesn't have food stored. What I'm trying to get at is, knowing we've got food for the next week doesn't have to depend on intellectual thought or conscious knowledge in the sense that we use. I'll perhaps have to go have a look, see what the science has to say.
Hmm. Not a very good reply really, but I'm just back from work, so I shan't be trawling the internet right now to find support for my arguments. Having said that, taoism really hinges on stopping trawling the internet for information, and instead trawling oneself for truth, so maybe I'll just do that instead.
Comments
How different life would be if we were all deeply and constantly aware that this moment is our last 'moment' of life, even from birth. Life, no matter how long we live, is but a flickering moment; [chref=5]better to hold fast to the void[/chref].
All right, but which comes first? (1) Being deeply aware this moment is our 'last and only' moment makes holding fast to the void inescapable, or (2) holding fast to the void makes for being constantly aware this moment is the only moment. Perhaps this an example of [chref=56]mysterious sameness[/chref] (and maybe not all that mysterious either).
Keep watching to hear him talk of how "the nowness of everything is absolutely wondrous".
A textbook example of achieving clarity through the dropping of the "mask" or ego (he refers to this). In this case, his imminent and unavoidable death has done this unmasking for him. Though I think there are other routes.
You discuss "jumping" in another discussion: Maybe one can make oneself jump (out of the mask, as it were).
But perhaps we need to be pushed.
Thanks for that link. I enjoyed it. His sincerity is palpable. You say, “But perhaps we need to be pushed”. I would say life’s [chref=51]circumstances[/chref] relentlessly “push” us, as I think he exemplified. The only “other route” to actually being at death’s door, is some awareness that one is virtually at death’s door, even though that door may lie a bit further down life’s road than ‘now’. I guess it all boils down to awareness doesn’t it? What can we do to jump start awareness? Jump!
Jumping into ‘now’, it is less about “making oneself” jump, and more about letting go of enough baggage we are carrying (future and past) so that we can jump. Making oneself let go is an oxymoron of sorts. The “making ourselves” is part of the baggage onto which we hold. Like that old saying about fighting fire with fire.
It is very poignant how we deep down intuitively [chref=71]know[/chref], even while the surface waters of our lives remain choppy and changing, with thought struggling to negotiate the perceptual chasm. It is the human story.
Now, about this "jumping" business.
I say that we cannot make ourselves "jump". Because we have no "Free Will" as you would put it.
The "jump", to me, is a metaphor for one's ego letting itself expire. The intellectual thought processes which keep us locked out of a broader sense of reality would have to decide, that it was rational to stop thinking rationally.
This cannot happen. This is the very nub of the problem. We cannot jump.
I say that we either have to trick ourselves into climbing down, getting our feet wet, wading out, and finally without realizing how we got there, find ourselves in the flow. Or we knock ourselves senseless such that we FALL.
And, to my way of thinking, this "climbing down" is what Taoist recommendations help us to do - by avoiding and not feeding the intellect, maybe by putting more emphasis on what the body gets up to as opposed to the mind. Meditation.
Divert our energies away from the intellect and it might slowly weaken until eventually it gets in tune with reality, the Tao.
This is not being "pushed" though.
I think that a another way to get the intellect to stop going around in its circles is to exhaust it past the point of collapse. This can happen due to a life crisis - like impending death (a very hard push) - which the intellect will try to come to terms with but fail. But I don't think that contemplating one's eventual death somtime down the road would lend the necessary impetus to "break" the intellect - it will not find the problem compelling enough to drive itself to distraction. It will break off to go and make the mortgage payment.
Along these lines the Zen kaon approach is taking this approach - get rid of the intellect by driving it to self-destruction. I understand that in this program, one is tricked by the teacher's encouragement to funnel all one's intellectual energy into banging one's head against the metaphoric brick wall of what some abstract word puzzle "means' intellectually.
I would be very interested and appreciative to hear your views on my take on this problem.
I don't think one needs to "break the intellect" or "stop thinking" to experience a broader sense of reality. Someone said "hearts gotta beat; brains gotta think"; it's the nature of our brain to think. Let it be.
The practice of meditation is nothing but experiencing nowness and through the attention of being present (when I can manage it), I don't need to jump out of the mask, the mask is dropped with no effort. Like Carl said, it is a letting go, an action of non-action. Then you will experience a crack in the illusion and a little peek into your natural, original self.
I don't know about needing to jump. Maybe that would work, but in my experience, sitting up straight and paying attention over and over and over works for me.
I find courage to be the key. Ultimately it comes down to the courage to face death. There is no gradual way to let go, i.e., now you have ‘it’… now you don’t. And what is courage really? Only when we feel we have no choice, no alternative route, no escape, do we feel the courage to jump. Until then we struggle to have it both ways so to speak. Think of a solder jumping on a grenade to protect his comrades. I must add that the jumping is not a one time deal, like our widely cherished born-again and enlightenment myths. Each moment is the renewed opportunity to muster the courage to jump, to rise to the occasion. Each moment is a ‘new day’.
“...stop going around in its circles is to exhaust it past the point of collapse”… Yes, exactly so. Personally, I find that by earnestly grappling with correlations my intellect “collapses” and [chref=52]gives up the discernment[/chref]. All 'my' consciousness is left with, as the chapter 56 puts it, is [chref=56]mysterious sameness[/chref]. Not permanently… thankfully, but just enough to be [chref=10]capable of not knowing anything[/chref]. I ‘know’ such “collapses” are experienced universally. It has to be so because the discernments our minds make are ultimately illusions, and we ‘know’ it. This drives us to struggle like hell to shore up the walls of belief to shelter our psyche from this sense of [chref=16]emptiness[/chref] that haunt us. And yet we yearn for the ‘detachment’ that our illusion of emptiness promise.
It is all very ironic I feel. We have what we want, yet we seek what we have, for what we have drives us to seek itself. Oh illusion, it is such an odd critter!
My goodness, what a crazy reply your comments stirred up.
The kind of thinking I mean though, is the kind of thinking that uses words and images, and which I find necessary to form opinions, create worries, think about the past and future, and generally make me self-conscious. That's what the neo-cortex is good at and it is very useful at times. But it can get carried away.
When I meditate I can - with irregular success - get it to stop. But I can't achieve this by thinking about stopping. And, of course, when I do manage it, then as soon as I say to myself, sitting there, "Ah, got it - I'm not thinking any more." It's gone.
Sometimes concentrating long enough on the breath will switch it off after a while. But sometimes, if I'm in good practice, I can switch it off by some kind of mental move I make - not sure what it is - a bit like the kind of feeling when I try to wiggle my ears.
But that's just during meditation. What this guy in the interview got was something more radical.
I have to confess that a few years ago, I went through a crisis and when I came out of it I was for a several months, in a state of mind which I could match to his description of how he saw life. It was around this time that I first came across Taoist and Buddhist writings and they all were perfectly clear to me in their meaning, and describe very well what I was experiencing. All the poetical stuff in the books just seemed a perfect description.
My rational thinking was sharper than before, but I could call it up when I needed it and then dismiss it when done with it. Quite a blast.
It didn't last though. I thought things were going to stay that way permanently, and I didn't think that any maintenance work was necessary.
I've been trying to get it back for a long time, but as much as I'd like to "jump" back into that way of looking at things, I can't make it happen. To paraphrase Curly (of the Three Stooges)
"I'm trying to not think, but nothing's happening!"
So this is where I'm coming from in terms of "jumping". I have decided that, short of another crisis, I need to put more effort into the meditation and other such training. I can't get the switch to just flick over in one big move.
Oh yes, that's what I was trying to say. Or rather, that thinking cannot be the mechanism for stopping thinking.
If I pose you this problem: "Stop thinking about pink monkeys!" I say that the only way you will solve the problem is by maybe ignoring it; or thinking about it and getting bored by it and drifting off to think about something else; or maybe by something external distracting you. You will not get yourself to stop thinking about pink monkeys through thinking about how to stop. It's like commanding someone to be spontaneous. Or telling a child to go to sleep. Or telling yourself to "jump" out of your ego.
At least that's what I think. ... D'oh!
Simply put, its not the thinking that disturbs the flow of consciousness, it is the belief in what we think and say that binds us. Cease believing that monkeys are monkeys, that pink is pink and presto chango! Of course cutting ourselves off from the secure sense of life meaning that words promise is the difficulty. We want to hang on. Letting go of that connection feels like death. Perhaps this is why experiences with actual death can sometimes be liberating, as least for awhile until a secure sense of life meaning truly reestablises itself.
Just say "No!"
I think that you are glossing over a step there: HOW do I lose faith and stop believing?
Surely that is not an intentional act.
It's like telling me to fall in love, or to have hiccoughs; that I can get rid of my sweet tooth if I will simply dislike the taste of sugar.
But how do I do that?
What I am after is a technique for producing that end result. A technique, because a willful intention just isn't going to work.
Isn't your Correlations one such technique? And another might be meditation. Another route (although not a technique) might be an external crisis.
Although I might intentionally (using my will) undertake to use such methods, these methods do not in themselves employ my will to make things happen.
This is what I meant when I said that thinking will not get you to stop thinking.
Perhaps we are asking the 'wrong' question. Rather than asking "HOW do I lose faith and stop believing?", ask "WHY do I have faith and believe in _(you name it)_?" Answer that and you may begin to see "HOW". Asking why helps 'just saying no' actually work (i.e., as knowing deepens). Personally, I've found that WHY must precede HOW.
True. "Willful intention" is like fighting fire with fire.
Correlations only work if preceded by WHY. Maybe they are just a place to hang your WHY.
But again, I'd say "to stop thinking" is not necessary or even desirable. It is the depth of trust we feel in our thinkings that stirs things up. Why is the most potent weapon we have to vanquish that trust.
Biologically speaking, I suspect that we are driven to find the answers as quickly as possible to fill up the whys we feel. So I ask myself, HOW do we keeping the whys alive moment to moment ? The answer, HOW, lies in the WHY.
If there are "sub-conscious" origins to the kind of thought processes I'm talking about I can't see how those origins are going to be open for inspection by our conscious thought processes asking "why?"
But I'll do some more thinking (sic) and maybe post something relevant on another thread. (That way we don't keep seeing the discomforting "A Dream of Death" on the home page all of the time!)
It is not so much “by our conscious thought processes”, although that usually gets the consciousness ball rolling. [chref=2]Thought and silence produce each other[/chref]. Begin with the thought, end with a knowing silence. [chref=10]When your discernment penetrates the four quarters, are you capable of not knowing anything?[/chref] Asking “why”, helps discernment penetrate the four quarters. And then…
WHY? The question HOW to answer a post is answered differently by everybody.
Understanding a dream is important, at least for the dreamer.
It may answer the WHY and HOW at the same time - at least for some question.
To understand a dream answers WHY you dream it and HOW to apply its images.
So, I imagine that it has been my dream, and I desire to know its meaning for myself. If something worth sharing results, I share it. Having shared that which I got from something that is not mine, it becomes something others may value; I trust it will [chref=81](cf. 81:4)[/chref]. Proceed...
For many, no doubt, the horror of a concentration camp as depicted in the dream, seems to be the last thing they want to experience. However, those who do (or did), do not all experience horror all the time.
Wouldn't it be shocking to realize that a 'normal' life, with 'life's securities' such as different persons having different hair-styles, with our 'mutual understanding' that we each face the same ordeal, is exactly the horror that we want to avoid? But not everybody wants to avoid it, apparently. Neither does everybody see the normal as horror, nor the horror as normal [chref=2](cf. 2:1-2)[/chref].
The horror of a concentration camp is one extreme opposite of a normal life. Another extreme opposite is one where you do not perceive relationships as important. Yet another extreme opposite is one where everything that comes along is valued.
In the last extreme, horror is valued, relationships are valued, normal life is valued. How these three relate to each other adds a third dimension to the valuation. Being valued does not mean a specific value attached, being in a situation does not mean it has only one value, being related to does not mean more than not being related to. [chref=42](cf. 42)[/chref].
My dream is to experience the opposite of what appears to be the general [chref=1](i.e. not eternal?, cf. 1:1)][/chref] opinion about the situation. To achieve it, I have to value all opposites [chref=1](i.e. entrance of ~, cf. 1:6)[/chref] equally; even see [chref=1](i.e. observe, cf. 1:4)[/chref] them, where they are not obvious [chref=1](i.e. obscure, cf. 1:6)[/chref]. The more I value, the more value comes to me [chref=81](cf. 81:4)[/chref].
Being surrounded by death is life when your dreams are different,
being surrounded by life is death when your dreams are eternal.
Any preference?
Just be between life and death...