Veritas said:

Sorry, I missed this one the first time around:

Quote:

Inner space journeys, huh??  What's that...??

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Exploration of one's own mental landscape.  Poking around in the dark, dusty corners to see what skitters out.  Double-digging the dirt in your emotional garden to aerate the soil.  Cleaning the windows of your perception with hot water and vinegar to remove the fingerprints of habit.  Wandering through the woods of potential which surround your established homestead of living.

I think you get what I mean.    I don't call it spiritual, because that term carries negative connotations for me.

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While I am entirely a latecomer (and outsider) to this thread, never the less, concerning the first post.  To me, this is not about spirituality, what is or could be. Or semantics and the words we choose, or our motives for personal beliefs.

The example, the specific concept, isn't that a bit like the futility of desiring to transcend desire?
Any mental attitude that removes your focus away from this moment, experiencing here and now...to, I will be so much happier when I have this... when I do that... when I am a more whole person, when I have become enlightened, I will be much happier then.

When some aspire to a higher state, enlightenment/awareness, whatever name you give...and yet this future desire blinds and distracts you from what already is. This desired perfection defeats itself.

It is a form of escapism, and I feel it is a trap that can be accidentally attached to the "enlightenment" idea.

Perhaps like the horizon, as I attempt to approach it, I will never arrive.

Quote:

So go ahead and meditate, practice yoga, sit at your guru's feet...but question any message that these experiences are worth more than the simple pleasure of sunshine on your face.  Doubt any teacher who denigrates your material existence in favor of the gleaming mirage of enlightenment.  Eat a nectarine after class, and let the juice run down your hand so that you can lick it off.

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It seems that much of this paragraph is a perfect example of enlightenment. Maybe we are working with a synonymous definitions, but it seems you are defining enlightenment as some sort of static knowledge that can be attained.

As I understand it, enlightenment, and zen for that matter, is simply to be awake in the present and not have your mind clouded with over speculation and to be without the pursuit for extra knowledge, indulgence.

This is the zen I experience at the peak of a good hallucinogenic experience, immediately after sex with someone I love, meditating in a field, then eating a peach with the sunshine on my face, and then thinking lucidly and very little. Just a feeling of connection with the present.




~Monk

Veritas said:

It seems to me that we humans have created the idea of enlightenment out of a desire to be "saved" from ourselves.  Rather than dealing with the day-to-day, nitty-gritty details of our neurotic and irrational beliefs, we focus on the gleaming mirage of personal enlightenment.  Once we reach this oasis in the midst of the barren desert of mortal life, we dream, we will drink our fill of wisdom & rest in the shade of inner peace.

But what if the "desert" is the result of this sort of fantasy?  What if we make our lives barren by pouring the waters of our power into the dream of perfection?  How much enjoyment can we find in the here-and-now when we constantly compare it to the airbrushed images in our own minds?

IMO, the juice and spice of human life is not found in perfection.  Everything we desire, all that we long for, is available to us in each moment of our flawed lives.  If we could drop the fantasy, drop the unfair comparisons, drop the judgment of what IS, the treasures of experience would appear before us.

The silly idea that material pleasures, sensual enjoyments, are somehow "less than" the spiritual ideals we have manufactured, would be revealed for the self-loathing nonsense that it is.  Why believe that an unreachable nirvana holds more value than the fleshly joy of eating a ripe nectarine?  When we denigrate and ignore what is actually available to us, we waste our brief time on this earth.

So go ahead and meditate, practice yoga, sit at your guru's feet...but question any message that these experiences are worth more than the simple pleasure of sunshine on your face.  Doubt any teacher who denigrates your material existence in favor of the gleaming mirage of enlightenment.  Eat a nectarine after class, and let the juice run down your hand so that you can lick it off.

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