Not Enough Knowledge For Contemplation?

[Nervewracking]

Hello, 
I want to learn how to live a truly contemplative life. So to me questions like this arose:

What if I just don't have sufficient intellectual / concenptual understanding of the matter that I'm contemplating about?

Isn't there little point in hourly contemplation if I have a little understanding of the world?!

Won't my contemplation practice only make sense if I do it alongside my practical experiences?

 

Please feel free to share any thoughts regarding contemplation and how you do it, I need clarification.

[Afonso]

The deepest contemplation does not come from the intellect.

Be still and insight will reveal itself.

If you're contemplating non-existential things or conceptual things, then a conceptual framework is important by logic. In my experience contemplation is more powerful when it's about insights not ideas, concepts or intellectual masturbation.

Edited August 24, 2017 by Afonso

[Sukhpaal]

I agree with Afonso. Sometimes during meditation I have some pretty crazy insights, just by sitting still and doing nothing. I wasn't trying to contemplate anything, I just sat there and it arose itself but maybe it is different for everyone. That is not to say it is the only way. Contemplation/Introspection are good, to have insights. Maybe you should try learning more about yourself such as: Triggers, habits, cravings, etc. I think that would be a good start and then build from there.

[Leo Gura]

@Nervewracking That is actually an advantage. The biggest enemy to true contemplation is per-concieved ideas or beliefs you picked up from others.

Sit and contemplate FROM SCRATCH!

Ask yourself a question like, "What is life?" and just contemplate it for a solid hour. Notice how much you discover.

All the answers a human being really needs are contained within. Not in books. Although books are still important.

[ajasatya]

18 hours ago, Nervewracking said:

What if I just don't have sufficient intellectual / concenptual understanding of the matter that I'm contemplating about?

Isn't there little point in hourly contemplation if I have a little understanding of the world?!

Won't my contemplation practice only make sense if I do it alongside my practical experiences?

what is contemplation?

[John Iverson]

20 hours ago, Nervewracking said:

Hello, 
I want to learn how to live a truly contemplative life. So to me questions like this arose:

What if I just don't have sufficient intellectual / concenptual understanding of the matter that I'm contemplating about?

Isn't there little point in hourly contemplation if I have a little understanding of the world?!

Won't my contemplation practice only make sense if I do it alongside my practical experiences?

 

Please feel free to share any thoughts regarding contemplation and how you do it, I need clarification.

do not be dependent in practices.. that is the reason many of us failed is because when we learn something to someone we inject it to our system the more we get frustrated the more you cling to ego unconsciously... it is good to have the foundation because life puts you in circumstances that you feel the calling.. the thing is if you start to feel what consciousness is  , it follows, it will guide you just feel the nature the life expressing itself body and mind is not your enemy to reject their expressions , meditation or contemplating is one of the good instrument for you to confirm of who you are.. but like now , you are lost or you do not see the true self because you give ego chance to move and ego will not give you the answer you will consume asking and asking that unconsciously ego give you shitsss  ..Right now ego is not your friend... ego will make you believe .. ego make you confused... forget about the practice forget about the concepts don't think.. don't use mind because mind is not your friend right now.. mind will say do this do that, you don't need to... the more you listen to mind the years will be wasted for searching for yourself.. stop also searching ... be conscious that mind is controling you of what you need to do..  

[Nervewracking]

@Alfonso
Nice words brother... but can you elaborate what you mean by non-existential things?

@Sukhpaal
Good tip! Thanks. 

@Leo Gura
Absolutely. I guess I am still too neurotic and preoccupied with getting answers from external sources. My ego-mind says something along the lines of: "You can only know stuff for certain if you learnt it in the past. Everything else is not certain."

@ajatasya
I don't know really ... I suppose contemplation is more about asking questions rather than getting answers

@John Iverson
Interesting. Thanks for the paragraph.

[John Iverson]

38 minutes ago, Nervewracking said:

Absolutely. I guess I am still too neurotic and preoccupied with getting answers from external sources. My ego-mind says something along the lines of: "You can only know stuff for certain if you learnt it in the past. Everything else is not certain."

Okay, so who see what you saw? You said that your ego mind says something.. how can you see that... that now you said that?? Who is that?? 

[Nervewracking]

Exactly.

[Nervewracking]

@ajasatya So by probing and asking ourselves a bunch of questions we can gain true knowing. Is this wisdom which we acquire from contemplation coming from the akashic records aka the unconscious mind? Is that one way to look at it or am I just spinning out stories here? Do you know anything about that?

[Leo Gura]

@Nervewracking It comes from the same place all creativity and evolution comes from.

[ajasatya]

@Nervewracking i'm studying it with the help of ayahuasca. in the last few sessions it felt like i was able to experience the memories of an indigenous man called "nkaka", which means "son of a great beauty". it felt extremely vivid. i had never heard of that word before and i could feel its meaning very deeply in my heart. i don't even know in what language it was spoken. nkaka would introduce himself hitting on his chest with the right hand while pronouncing "n" and then waving the right hand pointing to the sky while pronouncing "kaka". sometimes nkaka would say that he lives to honor his name. the atmosphere was very green, full of trees. and as he ran in the forest like the wind, it felt like i was the one running in the forest. and oh man, that was some incredible feeling.

was i experiencing some memories from the akashic records? was i visiting past lives? was i living fine products of the source of reality that were being made right away?

for me, these questions ring a huge bell. it feels like they're pointing to the same thing. can you feel how mystical this very moment is? because if you do, universal memory, past lives and raw creativity make complete sense.

[Mondsee]

On 24/8/2017 at 10:42 AM, Nervewracking said:

What if I just don't have sufficient intellectual / concenptual understanding of the matter that I'm contemplating about?

Isn't there little point in hourly contemplation if I have a little understanding of the world?!

Won't my contemplation practice only make sense if I do it alongside my practical experiences?

Listen, yesterday I went to a kindergarten to do volunteering work, and although until now I had always loved playing with children and teaching them kids, now that I have learned to put value into not-knowing, it was a cruel activity to do.

From the moment we arrived, we were bombing those clean minds with rules of drawing inside the lines, letters and their specific sounds, with colors and their names, with emotions and their names. It was so magical to see the teacher putting lots of pictures on the floor with faces expressing different emotions, then she asked a child to give her the picture of the sad boy, the child goes and picks a laughing girl and gives it to her, and the teacher goes "no, no, no, wrong Owen! put it back on the floor and go back to your place". I had to think, damn! that boy is so much wiser than the teacher, and yet he is getting absolutely discouraged for what he just did! We work so hard to get to a point where a sad face means exactly the same as a happy one, or better yet, I have the feeling that that kid didn't even identify the images as faces expressing emotions.

One last example was when they asked the girls to sit on one side and the boys on the other, and they sat all mixed up, so the teacher goes to the boys on the "girls" side and asks "why are you here? are you a girl?" those kids don't distinguish genders yet, we are all the same for them... genuinely! And that is exactly where we're trying to get with hard core contemplation.

Those kids know nothing (yet), they know so little, that they are miles ahead of us in terms of contemplation. If you, for whatever reason, feel like you don't have sufficient intellectual/conceptual understanding, be glad you don't! That will make things easier for you. If you have little understanding of the world, that means you'll have less garbage to put out of your mind. I actually think what you'll discover is that you have more intellectual & conceptual understanding than you'd want to have. Everything you know is already too much.

Edited September 15, 2017 by Mondsee
adding info.

[Nervewracking]

@Mondsee Holy cow! Powerful story. Thanks so much for the write-up. Do you contemplate a lot?

Also what you said dovetails very precisely with the quote in your signature. I might buy this book...

[Mondsee]

@Nervewracking Glad it helped you. I don't have a regular contemplation habit installed yet, but you can come by and visit my meditation journal where I register my progress on meditating every day!

I didn't thought about the relationship with my signature, but you're right! By all means, read Herman Hesse's work... if you're into contemplation, you'll absolutely love them!