Thoughts Do Not "arise From Nothingness"

[LetTheNewDayBegin]

@Salaam

 

You haven't described in detail how you increase your potential. Do you do a sitting session every day? Let me quote a meditation method from a different thread:

Do you do something like this? What do you think about it?

Also, increasing the learning ability is that one boosts development in every other aspect. You said:

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Other changes include the ability to access different kinds of flow states, greater access to instinct and synergizing it with my rational mind, the ability to handle the emotional curve of learning, including resistances like the feeling of "this is too hard" or "I don't know what to do" which often halts people in their tracks.

When my mind says "this is too hard", is it already too late to do something about it? Is my learning activity doomed at this point?

How do I train the mind to not give so much a power to these fake conclusions?

[Salaam]

8 hours ago, LetTheNewDayBegin said:

@Salaam

 

You haven't described in detail how you increase your potential. Do you do a sitting session every day? Let me quote a meditation method from a different thread:

Do you do something like this? What do you think about it?

Also, increasing the learning ability is that one boosts development in every other aspect. You said:

When my mind says "this is too hard", is it already too late to do something about it? Is my learning activity doomed at this point?

How do I train the mind to not give so much a power to these fake conclusions?

Oh man, it changes everyday, depending on which of those 12 compound elements my body is showing me I need to work on.

For instance, if I need to work on traction, then I'm working with pressure on that day. Differentiating the directions of pressure between front-end and back-end, or the pressure to hurdle forward and act and the pressure from things blocking your forward motion that lead to frustration and other reactions (there are other directions beyond that). I step into the middle of those pressures and hold them as they build in intensity rather than giving into their influence and reacting. What happens is the intensity builds and the tension increases till it crosses a threshold and once that threshold is crossed a small adaptation occurs. I'll stay calm and present, paying as much attention as possible to everything going on in my body during the whole process. Following the connections and inter-relations, the cascades that result from it. I won't do this for an hour, I'll do this for the whole day or a couple days if needed and then it will become something my body automatically does afterwards as it sees fit or if I need it.

So the pressure to scratch an itch, the pressure to move when standing or sitting still, the pressure to remember something, the pressure to fuck when my sexuality is roaring to go... pressure is involved in all facets of life, from pleasure to pain to motivation to drain (an absence or lowering of pressure). I work with pressure across varying intensities and the more meaning it has, the more tied into my actual life and desires, the better. It makes me a much stronger and more stable person, because it means I can hold the pressure and then act, rather than just get impacted by the pressure and REACT.

These past couple days I've been working on coherency and fidelity. Doing my best to stay in what I call my zone of normal, no matter how exciting or stressful things might get. If I start getting too excited or too hype I remind myself to stay normal and keep my head. Resisting the pull to indulge in a greater wash of energies. So during boxing I wouldn't let myself get too excited and lose my pace, same for during sex, and every other activity during the day, always keeping an eye on my levels and not crossing thresholds. Doing so allows me to stay in the space where the greatest amount of coherency and fidelity of communication is present, so I'm internalizing the greatest quality of information. It may not seem like much, but I've crossed points in my development where my body trusts me enough to remove certain limiters upon what feelings and experiences I can access. This means wider ranges of intensities that includes my body tantalizing me with the release of crazy amounts of euphoria that I have to ignore and not over-indulge in because it puts a strain on my body and creates a chemical wash that at times is opposed to the learning process (the over-excitation takes me out of my zone of peak coherency). Plus it's a lot for the liver and kidneys to clean up afterwards, especially when indulged in chronically, creating a drain on my health that will make me sick.

I've got a journal on here, where I used to write down my daily experiences with this stuff and what I focused and worked on. You may or may not find it interesting.

Regarding your last question, no you're not doomed, just temporarily blocked (although some people never do get past that block or attempt to try, depending on how much they buy into their certainty that the feeling is true). It's an emotional response and how you relate to that emotional response determines what happens immediately afterward. This would involve resiliency, which is how quickly you bounce back to normal after the impact of an energetic stimulus, plus rapport, which is the aforementioned way you're relating to the challenge, and traction which I talked about earlier.

Imagine a magnet and a piece of metal. When their close but not touching you can actively feel the pull of magnetism. It's activated, but once they touch and attach, that pull, that activated magnetism tangibly dissipates. In a way this is analogous to what happens with those emotional challenges. As soon as you feel that stress, but before your mind generates the narration of this is too hard, is when the metal and the magnet are activated but not yet attached. When the line of thought "this is too hard" initiates is when the metal and the magnet snap together. You've attached to the stress being past a certain threshold, which creates an emotional collapse, and that shift in attachment is actually what spurs the line of thought that "this is too hard". Every time we come to a conclusion about a thing, things have energetically snapped and attached together, creating a decrease in tension or decrease in the activation of magnetic pull per our analogy. This is the comfort a person feels when they have closure. The release of a tension, a tension often times felt as a pressure or even a discomfort subtly pushing you to resolve and close the opening, the uncertainty and potentiality.

After training with the three capabilities I mentioned, what happens is you can handle the stress so the threshold that caused the collapse has a much higher ceiling than before, a ceiling most things with a given level of complexity won't reach. So you don't cross that threshold of collapse, and you can handle the tension and discomfort of keeping your focus open about a stimulus rather than immediately closing with a conclusion about it being out of reach. So rather than "this is too hard" you feel the stress of complexity, but in response it's maybe curiosity or determination or playfulness in regards to that complexity, which keeps you in the space to stay focused on unraveling it's complexities, rather than getting hit with the emotion of I can't do this and the resultant demotivating forces, which also take you out of the flow state and immersive space you normally would have been in, while working on the complex challenge.

Hopefully, this makes sense to you. It's very much like any other physical training. You want to get a stronger deadlift, you work on exercises that strengthen the muscles you need to perform that action. Here, instead of working on your back, butt, and hamstrings, you're working on resiliency, traction, and rapport. Pushing past previous thresholds of stress, reaping the adaptations and raising your ceiling in the process so you can live and do more than before.

Edited March 23, 2017 by Salaam

[Salaam]

This is amazing
 

 

[Emerald]

On 3/21/2017 at 0:59 PM, Salaam said:

Thoughts actually don't just "arise" out of nothingness. They are activated and flavored by shifts in the contrast between our inter-connections that occur as things move/change inside us and outside us. We have a narrative system that is hooked into or superimposed onto our level of flow that automates the pace of internal chitter-chatter and maintains a given degree of immersion plus a given degree of populated conscious activity.

When people meditate and try to hold "nothingness" or an empty mind or whatever, they are in essence trying to slow/calm that flow and create a short-lived vacuum or pocket of thoughtlessness (among other things, there are many different kinds of meditation, which is really just practice of some flavor of applied focus). And of course when that vacuum releases, the thoughts come back, whether the vacuum was released willfully, or a shift in our body caused the automatic release. The release of the vacuum is a shift event in and of itself which is an emotionally competent stimulus that will trigger thought narratives and influence how they "appear" to manifest. We can't get caught up in that single shift and tunnel-vision to the point, where that is the only reference from which we draw conclusions. There is way more there to explore and way more we have to develop to even have proper access to those avenues of exploration.

So people make the mistake of jumping to the conclusion that thoughts arise from this vacuum because they haven't sensitized themselves to the bodily shifts, nor have they developed the tensile resiliency or traction to deal with how those shifts effect our cognitive recollection of the actual experience. They don't account for or properly attribute how the vacuum state influenced the mixture, which flavored the trigger of thought as it preceded, much like people fail to attribute or account for the weight or influence of observation having an effect on the collapse of a wave function when conducting science expirements.

In that fraction of a second where things shift, there is a shit load of things going on that are fast as hell, and more subtle then a whisper on the wind. Not to be melodramatic or anything, but internal transitions are hard as hell to gain a clear picture on, because every move you make in response to a transition influences the transition, which influences you on every level from cognition to immersion to emotion and everything else. We're trying to bring some kind of clarity to an ever-changing mixture that we are a part of and are influenced by at all times, which takes a lot of time and a lot of development to be able to create requisite levels of a kind of meta superposition to be even able to accomplish. And instead of doing all that, or even knowing to do all that, people just stick with the idea, that thoughts arise out of nothingness, because that's all their feel for things can tell them at the time and so they miss out on the potential for more. We have to be more humble than that and buy less into this false certainty "that this is all there is". This is where the uncertainty principle comes in handy as a protection against false certainty. In essence, beware a conclusion that leaves you no access to further potentialities, because a conclusion that absolute is a false and flawed one. Our view of life and ourselves does not have to be that primitive, nor so extreme and divorced from the nuances of reality.

Generally speaking, I wish people would remind themselves that they don't have to approach the question of free will in a binary way. We are a dynamic mixture of automation and free will superimposed on top of each other and the dance of that mixture plays out, in more than a single step. We automatically activate, then consciously calibrate, then automatically activate in response to that conscious calibration, which we then consciously calibrate again as we make choices. It is a dance with overlapping or slightly superimposed steps of automated activation and conscious balancing/calibration via choice with mutual avenues for inter-influence that compounds over time in a hopefully constructive way. The degree of depth, and the determination of which is the dominant or secondary force, driving the dance changes depending on the person and their unique context in a given moment. Distinct, but seamless and the degree of difference in what people might create from such a dance staggering.

Great post!

 

[Salaam]

13 hours ago, Emerald said:

Great post!

 

Thank you!

[Salaam]

On 3/21/2017 at 6:09 PM, Echoes said:

@Salaam Why imaginative? It is the direct opposite. You are the one imagining various theoretical constructs and conditions. Where do thoughts arise in your actual experience? Out of what? 

But what is the "place" in which heat, bone, sinew, brain and every other thing can exist/arise? Can it be another thing? And in which does this thing then exist? Nothingness is the absolute ground for every-thing.

Actually no, You are assuming what I'm doing is imagining theoretical constructs, when in reality I am honing my observational skills and capabilities with years of dedicated training that allows me to have a deeper and more nuanced direct experience. The observations science have made are a supplement to my direct experience, not a replacement. It's a corroborator just like my direct observation of nature and how it mirrors the movements inside me is a corroborator and reference.

People are so dunning kruger with direct experience and too ignorant to realize how much more our bodily processes need to develop and evolve. In essence what I am telling you people is you THINK/BELIEVE these things about absolute nothingness because you are jumping to conclusions about the direct experience of reality before properly developing the multitude of capabilities humanity depends on for interacting and communicating with life via direct experience.

"How can you discover a potential change if you're not aware of it or sensitive to it? How far can potential take you if you can't trust it? How well can you internalize a group of sensitivities if they're not coherent and able to create a story to build upon? What good is the story if it's rapport's are off, if it's chemistry is adversarial and in conflict? How far can you take a story if it can't flow and dance? How can you share it if you can't simplify it? What good is simplification if it get's so simple it becomes one-dimensional and it's connections collapse? How can you even build any story, or create any change of length, if you are not resilient enough to handle the pressures of it's development? If you haven't given yourself the authority to choose to do so?"

Each of the above points to a specific capability we employ during direct experience. If they are not developed, not connected and synergized our experience of direct reality will be limited and flawed. We will fall prey to delusion, over-certainty, superiority, tunnel-vision, and derail our growth. We have to train them physically via life and it's resistance, much like weight training. Not just from sitting in some safe little space on a cushion for an hour and asking ourselves a couple of questions.

Life demands way more then that for evolution.

[Echoes]

@Salaam So are you doing all this also in your deep sleep? Or are you arising out of nothing when you wake up in the morning? 

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People are so dunning kruger with direct experience and too ignorant to realize how much more our bodily processes need to develop and evolve. In essence what I am telling you people is you THINK/BELIEVE these things about absolute nothingness because you are jumping to conclusions about the direct experience of reality before properly developing the multitude of capabilities humanity depends on for interacting and communicating with life via direct experience

All bodily processes are again witnessed by the emptiness behind. You can call people ignorant or dunning kruger about this, but it doesn't make any difference. Of course you can develop your bodily awareness and connect the arising of thoughts with certain dynamics that take place, but all this stuff again takes place in "something" that is pure stillness. You can increase your awareness of events and connections/dynamics on the movie, but that doesn't change the movie screen.

[Salaam]

4 minutes ago, Echoes said:

@Salaam So are you doing all this also in your deep sleep? Or are you arising out of nothing when you wake up in the morning? 

All bodily processes are again witnessed by the emptiness behind. You can call people ignorant or dunning kruger about this, but it doesn't make any difference. Of course you can develop your bodily awareness and connect the arising of thoughts with certain dynamics that take place, but all this stuff again takes place in "something" that is pure stillness. You can increase your awareness of events and connections/dynamics on the movie, but that doesn't change the movie screen.

See if a person actually makes deep progress with awareness and internalization, they experience that there are many layers of consciousness and sub-conscious automation that require particular flow states which also have to do with different types of brain waves and chemical cascades within our body that need their time of activation and expression. When I sleep, those are the processes working and I have trance states that occur as I transition from those layers so the depth of my awareness and ability to observe doesn't disrupt or collapse their process. I can actually have half of my brain awake and the other asleep much like seals do as I transition, which protects the flow and activation of other parts of my brain as they come on line. So, no I don't arise out of nothing when I wake up in the morning. Why? Because I've expanded my awareness and sensitivity to deep layers of my sub-conscious, while still being delicate enough to not disrupt their integrity and coherency. This allows me to feel all the other things going on, that other people without this connection to deeper layers won't have access to.

I get it, this absolute stillness/nothingness is a belief you're highly invested in and attached to. But again, based on my years of experience and success you're basing that belief on a level of cognitive development that is not reliable for making absolute conclusions. If you can't see that or don't want to see that, can't admit and humble yourself to the further development needed then...
 

[Echoes]

@Salaam You are calling people of who you don't even know how much experience they have "ignorant" "dunning kruger" "not on your level of cognitive development" "not able to make absolute conclusions". I don't know, maybe you are the one deeply invested and attached to your beliefs? I guess the Buddha and guys like R.Maharshi and Adyashanti are also not on your coginitive level?

[Salaam]

1 hour ago, Echoes said:

@Salaam You are calling people of who you don't even know how much experience they have "ignorant" "dunning kruger" "not on your level of cognitive development" "not able to make absolute conclusions". I don't know, maybe you are the one deeply invested and attached to your beliefs? I guess the Buddha and guys like R.Maharshi and Adyashanti are also not on your coginitive level?

Eh, you can twist it however you want. If that makes you feel better. What you fail to realize is I have faced and still continue to face my own ignorance and work to balance whatever potential for dunning kruger I may also contain. I hold myself to the same standards I am talking to you about.

So yes, if a person hasn't experienced what it's like to counterbalance expansion and limitation/blindness and watched to make sure thresholds of certainty don't breach levels of delusion then I won't trust their cognitive level. If they haven't worked with tension and the modulation of tension on attraction, repulsion, and consequently attachment then I won't trust in their tensile resiliency.

If you don't have a certain standard of self-accountability and development of cognitive capability, then I won't trust in the accuracy of your conclusions. I will respectfully challenge you with questions and avenues of investigation my past experiences have required me to also take.

I mean that's a pretty standard practice in life. I wouldn't let you do surgery on me unless you were qualified and had put in the necessary time to develop your abilities and populate your knowledge base with the required information. And if I was a doctor myself I would be even more stringent in my choice of who to trust, since my own knowledge base would be that much more well-informed.

But, if you want my honest opinion I do see flaws in what writing I've reviewed from Adyashanti and Buddha as well. Neither of them are all that great. Can't comment on the other guy, because I haven't reviewed his work.

I actually wrote a minor review of an Adyashanti video below. But it'll most likely trigger you, because it runs counter to your internalized beliefs and authority structures...

 

Edited March 24, 2017 by Salaam

[Echoes]

@Salaam What makes you think that I have not faced my own ignorace? Is it because I am not agreeing with you? So everybody who is not agreeing with you hasn't faced their ignorance, is "arrogant", and is twisting things to make them feel better? You assume other opinions are merely "internalized beliefs" and they are triggered from your perspective. Have you considered  that all this maybe is not the case? That you are projecting your own mentality onto others? Why the need to degrade other opinions?

See, I could say the exact same thing to you. You haven't yet realized absolute nothingness and the background in which all of your cognitive dynamics are arising, and therefore I don't trust in the conclusions you have come to. All of what you have said plays in the relative realm of experience, you haven't yet touched that in which all this plays.

[Martin123]

@Toby didnt read. Ego = overstimulated nervous system. Thoughts = verbal manifestation of the NS.

[Salaam]

11 minutes ago, Echoes said:

@Salaam What makes you think that I have not faced my own ignorace? Is it because I am not agreeing with you? So everybody who is not agreeing with you hasn't faced their ignorance, is "arrogant", and is twisting things to make them feel better? You assume other opinions are merely "internalized beliefs" and they are triggered from your perspective. Have you considered  that all this maybe is not the case? That you are projecting your own mentality onto others? Why the need to degrade other opinions?

See, I could say the exact same thing to you. You haven't yet realized absolute nothingness and the background in which all of your cognitive dynamics are arising, and therefore I don't trust in the conclusions you have come to. All of what you have said plays in the relative realm of experience, you haven't yet touched that in which all this plays.

Well, remember ignorance isn't a "yes or no" binary thing. There are degrees and areas, levels and layers. Ignorance is a very deep topic. Agreement is not the fulcrum upon which ignorance is being decided upon here. But, capability and how that capability expresses is (at least on my side of this discussion). 

It's interesting that you see my disagreement as a degradation. I guess you could call it that, but that's a little extreme in my opinion. It's more so an invalidation and rejection, due to the fact that I have a better view and grasp on reality, again according to my experience and awareness of the world around me and within me, compared to your absolute nothingness paradigm.

Yea, you could say the same exact thing to me, in fact you are and have been since your initial reaction to becoming aware of my words. You can say and choose to believe whatever you want, but that won't change the fact that most of the things I've talked about and experienced and capabilities I've gained, you have yet to experience and manifest for yourself. Most people haven't and most people won't, because it's fucking hard and requires at least a decade of dedication constantly exposing yourself to the edges of all that nature has awaiting us. A couple years of hourly meditation and some visits to a retreat are not up to par.

Will that rub people the wrong way? Maybe, but maybe that just means they need to work on their humbleness more. Once you balance and anchor into both confidence and being humble, you don't fall that often into either superiority or inferiority when you become aware of others differences in relation to yours. It's that swing to the extremes that people bitch about when it comes to ego.

Eh, at least I tell you why I'm rejecting it and provide counter-points of what I think are better ways and myriads of examples all across the universe that show that reality is moving in harmony with my chosen paradigm.

Man, I fucking love the universe. Just feeling it move through me is like breathing in ecstasy right now. I wish more people could feel the fields permeating the universe at all times. Y'all are missing out

[FirstglimpseOMG]

@Salaam Your thoughts occur within something (absolute no-thingness lol). Let's just keep it simpler, rather than allowing masturbative, endless introspection and comparison to make your ego feel the need to defend itself. 

What is it that you imagine your thought-forms occur within?  You appear to be completely caught up in consensus reality and naive realism. This is not a put-down or a slight. 

 

[Toby]

50 minutes ago, Martin123 said:

@Toby didnt read. Ego = overstimulated nervous system. Thoughts = verbal manifestation of the NS.

That's actually true. I didn't read most of it. No interest in it.

[Echoes]

@Salaam I don't see your disagreement as a degradation, but your constant labeling of other opinions as ignorant, and not on your level of development. Those are just blind assumption you make about people you don't even know, and you are doint it just because they have a different view. If you label Nothingness a paradigm, your "cognitive development" is also just that. You don't even know what the nothingness "paradigm" has to offer or how the actual nothingness feels, yet you are comparing it to your paradigm and saying that it is a higher developed one. What makes you think that the things I talk about are not things I experienced for myself? Again a blind assumption to validate your own viewpoint.

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Most people haven't and most people won't, because it's fucking hard and requires at least a decade of dedication constantly exposing yourself to the edges of all that nature has awaiting us. A couple years of hourly meditation and some visits to a retreat are not up to part.

That's the exact same thing that Leo for example is saying about Enlightenment too. See? Yours isn't the one and only true approach.

[Salaam]

1 minute ago, FirstglimpseOMG said:

@Salaam Your thoughts occur within something (absolute no-thingness lol). Let's just keep it simpler, rather than allowing masturbative, endless introspection and comparison to make your ego feel the need to defend itself. 

What is it that you imagine your thought-forms occur within?  You appear to be completely caught up in consensus reality and naive realism. This is not a put-down or a slight. 

 

Lol, nice way to characterize me. I disagree with it of course, but whatever, enjoy yourself.

What's your motivation here? Do you really want to understand me or are you entrenched in your own view and see mine in an adversarial light?

Quantum Superposition is within and among and on top of, all at the same time.

Personally, I can feel the shifts when my brain moves to send activation to my thoughts to start narrating and when the energy shifts elsewhere. I literally feel the subtle ways my magnetic lattice or whatever inside my head bends. I can feel which part activates when I'm thinking about numbers for instance versus thoughts of my wife. It's not about creation or arising but a different pattern of movement coinciding with different levels of activation across my body. I feel energy or fields or the shift of magnetism on top of my normal senses at all times, so my experiences and content of information will probably be different from yours. 

The thing is when I shift into that pocket of nothingness that you feel to be absolute, it's not an empty void for me. I feel those energy fields all throughout it, and feel at its edges all that is containing and being restrained around it as well.

But who cares right? If you have no reference for it yourself and a predisposition to believe in something that conflicts with what I'm saying then these words mean nothing to you.

 

[Salaam]

15 minutes ago, Echoes said:

@Salaam I don't see your disagreement as a degradation, but your constant labeling of other opinions as ignorant, and not on your level of development. Those are just blind assumption you make about people you don't even know, and you are doint it just because they have a different view. If you label Nothingness a paradigm, your "cognitive development" is also just that. You don't even know what the nothingness "paradigm" has to offer or how the actual nothingness feels, yet you are comparing it to your paradigm and saying that it is a higher developed one. What makes you think that the things I talk about are not things I experienced for myself? Again a blind assumption to validate your own viewpoint.

That's the exact same thing that Leo for example is saying about Enlightenment too. See? Yours isn't the one and only true approach.

Ah man, that's the thing though. I'm not doing it blindly.

I know the experience of nothingness. I went years where I had compete silence in my head as a rest state. Some would even call it enlightenment. I've been there already. I can bring about that nothingness or no-mind state whenever I want. It's effortless. 

I've done the attachment and non-attachment thing and can choose what I attach to and modulate the nuanced degree of attachment. What's better being non-attached, attached, or having the ability to choose when and where you attach or don't and the degree? I choose the latter. Buddha seems to have chosen the former.

I have 13 different compound patterns of foundational movement that exist and are occuring at all times at the same time that I am using to discern capability. There is a kind of goldilocks zone that has certain characteristics of feel when all 13 of those foundational elements are harmonized and synergized within that zone. Leo is missing some of those and I call him out on it if I come across that missing in a context that I feel will do a person harm, just like I do to anyone else. 

It's not about my approach, it's about these elements of movement. I didn't create them. I'm not even saying those 13 elements are all that is out there, in fact I'm saying the complete opposite when a person realizes that those elements encompass uncertainty, potentiality,mystery, and ignorance.

Again we all have ignorance, it's the degree and context of ignorance that matters and how it inter-relates with every other part of us. Having a different level of development is not a degradation to me. We can still be relationally equal in humanity, despite what flaws we may or may not have. We are discussing views and approach and what we trust, not who is more valuable as a human being. At least that's where I'm coming from, in case you felt differently from my writing.

[Echoes]

@Salaam Well if you are stating that what another is saying is ignorant, below your level, is twisting things to make them feel better, thats per definition a degradation of the things being said. Not necesserily of the human being.

So where exactly are we disagreeing? When you know that there is this nothingness, you should also know that it is the ground in which everything is arising and dissolving. Why would you attach to something if you are at peace and happy if you are non-attached? That doesn't make sense to me. Thats like saying "What's better not needing an orange, needing an orange, or having the ability to choose when and where you need an orange" You can enjoy the same things non-attached, and an attachement is always a illusory mental fabrication that is only real when you think it is. Why would one attach to transient things?

I'm not saying that your 13 different compound patterns or whatever isn't true, but I am saying that they are existing and arising in empty awareness. Yes, there are many modulations and things one can do with consciousness, but that doesn't change the background in which all this takes place.

[FirstglimpseOMG]

51 minutes ago, Salaam said:

I know the experience of nothingness. I went years where I had compete silence in my head as a rest state. Some would even call it enlightenment. I've been there already. I can bring about that nothingness or no-mind state whenever I want. It's effortless. 

Ah. And is that state not preferable to all the effort that goes into determining where synapses are firing in your 'brain' while you suffer along with the rest of us unenlightened fools? (...and silly gurus)

Just curious.