Thinking About Not Thinking!

Speaking of Zen, where the heck is jeeprs?

Meditation is not (not thinking). Most often the goal is to not be attached to that being thought.

Are you into meditation? I understand there are many forms of it. I wasn't really thinking about meditation, though. I was thinking about non-duality.

Do you think all the time? That's pretty common. People who do won't believe there are people who don't. We all tend to think everybody is just like ourselves until confronted with evidence that we're not.

hey nice to be missed. I defected to another forum but they have ominously not appeared this morning and I can't even ping them. I think they're gone. A good lesson in the transience of all things. It's all a 'sand mandala' anyway.

You cannot 'not think', or not by conscious effort, anyway. Alan Watts remarked once that the brain thinks in the same way as the stomach digests food - automatically and incessantly. But if you sit still long enough the mind starts to settle down. (This is actually measurable by ECG's - you get a different pattern of brainwave activity, 'theta-waves'.) If you persist with this you can reach states of inner quietness and the stilling of the mental chatter. That is what meditation is for. These 'levels' are all charted in Buddhist psychology - the various levels of 'dhyana' or meditative trance. (I only ever get to the most basic one.)

actually I had an hilarious image come to me the other day about thought and thinking. It was in the context of the endless disputes about whether God exists or not (ho hum.) You start to see the same arguments and attitudes appearing again and again. So it reminded me of that scene in Star Wars where they go into warp drive to land on a distant planet, and when they get there it has been destroyed by Darth Vader, so all there is left is an 'asteroid belt' of rocks where the planet used to be, and they had to dodge between thefragments in their spaceship.

That is what western culture is like nowadays. A destroyed planet which has disintegrated into the asteroid belt of postmodernism. And the value of meditation is getting out beyond the asteroid belt into the stillness of deep space.

Om.

Don't defect, jeeprs. The new philosophy group is just about to open and we want you there.

jeeprs!!!!!!!

Yea that's me on the asteroid to your left.... the one with Mr. Potato Head carved in it.

Once many moons ago my mind was particularly troubled and I thought meditation would help so I got a little red book with a tree on the front entitled: How to Meditate. It was a survey of many types. I'll have to share with you what happened with that sometime.

Inner quietness sounds good... namaste, my friend...

other forum is back up. there's some bright sparks on there at the moment. But I will be around here too.

I agree, I've missed seeing you around, jeeprs. Have fun on your other forum, but duck in here every once and a while, too. i feel like i disagree with a lot of what you say, but i always enjoy your company in a thread (reasonable people with whom one can disagree being so hard to come by these days.)

Take care.

Hi Jeeprs!

In my earlier years I was fortunate to reach certain states of virtual non-thought - whereas my thoughts would carry me and not me, the thoughts. I was reading a lot of T Lobsang Rampa at the time and discovered a state of non-materialism that I was able to venture to, almost at will. I closed a lot of doors to most of the typical issues that plague the human consciousness throughout life, and am, though less able to remove my bond with the (norm), absent from the worries and frustrations that are, I believe, prevalent in the everyday 'joe bloggs'.

I have a question for you: Do you believe that everything is connected - And I mean 'Everything'?

Thank you Jeeprs!
Mark...

I am running through this experience with people live around me who avoid thinking , they choose prepared stupid thoughts , and dealing with them is somehow impossible and harmful , they hate meditation and thinking . and they easily get upset and angry when asking them questions . they live in dark ,unthoughtful horizon.