Meditation and Religion... some others views.

I hang out lots at spiritualforums.com but not quite as much as I used to. Alot of it's said, doesn't need sayin' again and somebody else will anyways.

But these two bits were really good.

Meditation by Gem.
Hi,

I'm going to talk, but I have no interest in influencing people and their meditation techniques.

Meditation is the presence that continues throughout the changing experience. Equating the experience with meditation creates expectations and desires that meditation should be like this or that; however, people describe a vast range of experiences that occur during meditation, so it's obvious that no particular experience defines what meditation is... The word 'during' is relevant in the sense that meditation endures the mentioned variety of experiences.

This invariably comes back to you, and I use you in the generic sense because meditation must be a universal to all people. If it's a type of meditation, that's a personal practice, but the principle mediation is always the still presence of mind that remains throughout the changing experience.

It's often the case that the presence of mind is skittish, and change causes mental reactions that 'break' the trance-like spell of quiet beingness. That's quite normal and there is no reason to be disappointed, disheartened or deflated. The mind is accustomed to these deflating feelings and the sense of 'not getting it right' or something like that, but that's merely mental habits and there isn't any valid reason for it. There is no room for such feelings in meditation practice, so if one notices these counter-productive feelings,they would do well to cultivate patience and persistence in their place. These are the virtues that grow where disappointment and defeat dissipate.

To elaborate on the experience, there are pleasant and unpleasant experiences, and since meditation isn't pertinent to experiences per se, but to the stable self presence of the meditator, one cultivates a neutral balance of mind that is reflective of the central stillness of any one person's being. It doesn't matter if pain manifests in the body or if a flow of energy delights the senses, because if one can't meditate during a painful episode, and instead, is mentally unbalanced by their reactions to it, it reveals to the meditator that there is some work to do toward stablizing their balance of mind. In the case of pleasure the problems are more nuanced, but people tend to become desirous of pleasure, and are are unsettled when they don't get what they want, or they cling to it as opposed to letting it pass as it wont to do. In such a case, the person can also practice to enhance their stability and balance. This goes to say, that regardless the nature of the experience, all experience is an opportunity to cultivate the balance of one's mind.

I wish to explain why that is important. People are accustomed and habitualised to react with desire to pleasure and aversion to displeasure, and they don't always understand this kind of hatred and love is generated as mental reactivity that perpetuates egocentricity i.e. "I react". This illustrious figure, I, is completely constructed of the action/reaction process which drives the karmic wheel, produces the egomanic symptoms of me and my and mine, and perpetuates the very movement of mind that disturbs the meditator. It's the basis of suffering.

The body and mind are an interwoven fabric. The body manifests the contents of mind, and all of a persons emotional content is manifest in the sensual experience. If a person contains hard emotions from their past traumas or from self defeating beliefs, those emotions will manifest as hardened and painful sensual experiences, and they are toxic if held over the long term.

The reason they stay there for so long is that they are very unpleasant to endure, so people create an adverse reaction process. When that discomfort arises in their consciousness, they are compelled to engage an activity in order to avoid the feeling as it occurs, and persue a pleasurable feeling in order to distract themselves from it. This is the loop of aversion and desire or the duality of love/hate, and that process drives the continuation of the mind until all the stored thoughts and feelings finally complete their inevitable process (which we refer to as destiny, in a manner of speaking)

This brings me back to the cultivation of a neutral and stable balance of mind. This balance enables the unshakable presence of being to remain consistent. If one ceases the mental movement that I described above, and adopts a still disposition, the mental and emotional phenom manifest sensationally can be observed as they happen to be, and because the mind remains balanced, they can pass as freely as they are wont to do. Once they have completed their passage, they dissipate and are gone, and cease to recur (since the mental and emotional content no longer exists).

I must be coming to a conclusion. The thought that began about a half hour ago is now fading into an obscure mist; it came to me and went through a process of change that lasted for a while, and now it's fading fast.

Thanks

Then there's Bartholomew, channeled by a chap in Vancouver, Canada. about religion.
  The first thing is to deal with religions. They, all of them, are necessary because of the immaturity of the human race as a whole. The average man is not equipped to understand greater realities so he is given a simple "believe and be rewarded" format instead. OK that sounds pretty harsh and a critic will use the term, "judgemental". So be it.

the first thing to understand so that the complexity of the world makes better sense is to realize that creation, once begun, has never stopped. New "baby" human souls come into existence all the time just as mature ones "graduate" from the need to express through physical bodies. If it weren't for this fact no religion would have endured as long as they have. Considering the planet as a whole most, by far, of the humans who live on her are very young souls. Only a small percentage are older and there is only a very small group of advanced souls (in bodies) here on earth. Jesus is one of these but since the average soul could not relate to greater truths it is better to use the "father son" relationship instead when speaking of Him and God. The entire Bible is nothing more than an answer to the level of maturity of man. If man were "static", if all of us were the exact same spiritual age, there would be only one religion. In Christianity there would not be "denominations". The earth is not that way though. We are very diverse so religion is also. Want to know who is junior and who is senior. One way to find out is to look at who pushes religious conversion. No advanced soul would do that. Likewise it is unkind in the extreme to attempt to "down preach" the religious zealot. They cannot understand and such attempts just cause them pain.

Most advanced humans on earth live quiet lives in isolation. There is no necessary correlation between spiritual age and temporal position. Thus we find often that leaders in countries are apt to behave poorly. This works out to benefit us all in the end though.

The average person need not know about reincarnation. The information would be misused. Better not to know. There is a story that comes form ancient China where a person could legally promise to repay a debt in a future lifetime. No mature human would even consider such a thing. Better that we don't know. But some of us do know (about the universe of spirit) otherwise why would this website be here?

Souls are born, not in perfection, but in innocence. The begin their long journey in bodies on planets. Some come here and are humans. Very seldom do souls change planets because of great differences that would cause problems, getting in the way of learning. We live a thousand or more lifetimes on Earth. We all live as male, female, fat, skinny, ugly, good looking, rich, poor, gay, straight, tall, short, sick, healthy and as members of all the racial groups. By the time this is finished we've learned all the Earth can teach us. The acquisition of wisdom is the goal beyond which the "salvation and resurrection" of the Christian occurs.

Religions exist for the purpose of assisting us on our paths. The Bible of Christianity is written entirely in metaphors. The entire work is in parable form. In scripture are meanings within meanings within meanings. The Bible speaks clearly of the higher truths but the immature minds see these references and do not understand them. They choose instead to promote superficial meanings. This is good. Remember that religions are designed for immature souls. It would be inappropriate for advanced humans to attempt to correct them. Remember that new souls are coming to Earth all the time and these need the kind of guidance that only religions can provide.

You mention "soul plans" in your post. They exist. We all plan our lifetimes in advance. We select the type of body and the setting in which we will live in accordance with what we want to learn. The religious person will say that God does this but it is we who live our lives. God is the ultimate source but how are we to grow if we don't play an active part in our own lives? Where will wisdom come from if we can't participate in our own destinies? So, yes, we make plans for each life. What are our weaknesses right now? Are we quick to anger for instance? Then it is likely that this inclination is what we are attempting to overcome. Are we grossly ugly and fat? Perhaps we need to learn humility and have chosen to do it the hard way. Does a baby die in the crib? What acceptance lessons might the grieving parents learn? Are we judged unfairly and sent to prison for crimes we did not commit? Maybe we had unresolved violence issues in past lifetimes that were never finished. All this is possible.

Religions exist to make things easier for us. Better it is to be presented with a set of beliefs and rules than to sink or swim in the higher truths that sometimes would be so devastating. Religions are like safety valves. That they are superficially incorrect or incomplete is OK. A greater purpose is served.

One last thing is for us to realize that it is not our place to run around trying to "teach the world". The one who does this forgets that most of the world does not need to hear great truths. Most of the world needs what religions have to offer.

I was raised a Christian. I believe too much to be one now. No matter. I still enjoy the occasional visit to a church (I go to them all in turns) to experience what others around me have to share. Do we think in terms of acceptance? Most of us at least entertain the idea. Make it so then. Accept the fact that humanity is diverse, of all spiritual ages and that "the needs of the many seldom dovetail with the needs of the one". (Mr. Spock of Star Trek.)

As for "ah ha moments" that you mention. There are some of these every day it seems. Good that you put it that way. It's real.

A very BIG ah ha moment is the realization of the fact that not all souls are the same age and experience and that, further, religions do not account for this in their teachings.

One last thing. Christianity teaches us that we were created in perfection and that later we "fell" and are now sinful. This is incorrect. The doctrine of Original Sin is false. We were born in innocence and coming to Earth from the spirit worlds (Eden) was the plan all along. Remember the serpent in the garden? The snake is the almost universal primitive symbol of the Earth. Thus the snake in the garden signifies the necessary pull of the Earth to Adam and Eve. (everything is in metaphors) What the serpent said to Adam and Eve is irrelevant. The fact of it's presence at that moment is not. We had to come here to learn. Simply being created and living a stagnant, un-dynamic existence (through obedience) in heaven would be pointless. The reason the truth of this is not stated clearly in the first place is because if it were there would be no motivation through guilt and fear for us to make an attempt to advance. In the beginning we had no wisdom so we needed it's distant cousin, fear. We should not judge religions too harshly for this deception. It was necessary. Religions do not hide truth. The great souls who dictated scripture to prophets chose to "color" truth in terms that would be suitable for early, immature, man. Religions were then formed around and based upon these.

__________________
Blessings...

 

Lot's of stuff eh? Good stuff though. 

How to play...

I remember quite a few years ago sitting in a park with someone I hadn't seen for thirty odd years and telling her I felt that in any meetings of people there was a shared responsibility between them to have come to whatever space they shared. The illustration I used was a traffic accident and in that there supposedly was the active and the passive, or conventionally, the wrong doer and the victim, but my contention was that both shared equal responsibility in having that meeting exist.

Quite contentious really given our morality is such that the passive participant somehow has no active choice in being there, that chance or circumstance not of their choosing has brought them to be in a place where they have interacted with an active choice made by someone else.

Ah, that's right, now I remember what led me to this idea. It was that within meditation, or doing lots of meditation, my subconscious activity was becoming more pronounced in daily life. I became able to see these motivations just under the surface, I think, because my mind was much quieter and that emptiness, or emptierness anyways, left room for the subconscious to rise up into a more obvious place of motivation which was throwing me around and into circumstances where those subconscious needs could be met.

So from there it wasn't too much of a leap to realise a responsibility, an ownership as it were, for the need of the subconscious to be heard but also, in bringing up my own subconscious, to see how much others were driven by their own but without being aware of how much precedence over their lives the subconscious had.

This is where it gets weird though because with alot of people you aren't just speaking to one person but anywhere from two to a cavalcade and which might take precedence? That's because even whilst the conscious is there so is the subconscious and the subconscious can be a whole world unto itself, and then above even the conscious is the superconscious too, and if you try to speak to them all using your own intellect... well, there lies madness.

Then the role of intuitiveness becomes apparent, a parent of sorts, but it's not something one can control or sieve through ones own ideas of what is right and wrong. Stuff just has to fall out... as if the part of you that is the intellect, that which actively determines through thinking what is and what isn't right, has gone on holiday.

There's just this use by date notification when it becomes somewhat obvious you've reached the limits of the intelligence you've always relied on... it just doesn't work anymore, it's too slow and the two dimensional way it works through cause and effect just isn't up to the task. But, of course, one couldn't have even reached this point of seeing how dull the tool really is unless one had been playing with, in what was previously in the background, a much sharper and keener tool.

And play may very well be the optimum word.

Yet more rambling inconsequence.

I don't even go to Spiritual Forums much anymore but I did the other day and two posts have stuck with me. The first was about Jesus and Buddha and their state of enlightenment and especially a part about St John the Baptist being able to recognise such within Jesus. The next post was one by a fellow who'd lost his ability to be imaginative... and that's where I'll start because I have too.

It's not so much that it's gone so much as it's somehow surplus to requirements and if anything gets in the way. Over the years I've come to accept what might be called a visionary way in that eventually what needs doing would arrive as a vision that would just pop fully formed into my head and if and when I started on a path to bring such into reality whatever was needed would arrive, and not only that, but the cues to go certain ways, within that making, would arrive when they were needed.

This was interesting in many ways but the most interesting was that I was just there to do the cutting and putting together and even that the things themselves which were produced were almost completely unimportant next to the actual ability to channel... as it were. It was like I could look at the artworks or constructions with fresh eyes and ears just like anyone else because my part involved almost negligible violition on my part other than being there and listening then doing and following the prompts and that what actually came into being was always so beyond what I could have imagined myself.

And that the only way to achieve and stand beside such wonders was the ability to not personalise the achievement... that it wasn't me at all but something much greater and far more extensive in it's understanding, which came through too because there was a far greater understanding in what 'I' might achieve and what my actual skills were than 'I' could actually understand.

So the ability to imagine, to visualise, became almost an affront to the ability to just listen. But it became problematic, and still is to a certain extent, because as well there came a knowledge that these stories in the form of things somehow had their own life and volition to go into other peoples lives and do and be what they might need. There were even instances, and still are, where possibilities would be laid out and have others grab hold of them as if they were their own and then pulled back and denied... which I still had to stand beside and take the blame for having brought forth. This was very humbling indeed as the supposed recipients would vent all their frustration at me and I'm standing there within a much bigger story than I might have thought I signed on for and being almost completely defenceless. And it was good!

And this then makes the post about St John being able to recognise Jesus as very interesting... because in all truth he might have been one of the very few who could have but I don't want to really go into that except to say that the only thing we can ever see in another is ourselves... a little forward in a future, a possibility of ourselves a little more open or a little more closed off, as if the ultimate truth of life is that binary... selfishness or selflessness.

The tales of Twin Flames.

There is quite a bit on the net about this relatively modern phenomenon and it seems to be quite fashionable within spiritual circles but alike most things spiritual what it means at a lower level of implementation is really quite different than a higher implementation... not that I want to go all this is high and this is low but it serves the purpose of highlighting, in a sense, the reality of ego based yearning and soul based acceptance and possibly that the whole reason for the Twin flame phenomenon is to highlight the gulf worth traversing between the two poles.

The basic premise of Twin flames is that two individuals share the same soul and journey through lives helping each other to their eventual joining again in enlightenment with a side order that such is required within our own times to create a gestalt of sorts whereby the twins as individual bodies share the soul within life and are then doing work within life to advance the awakening of all individuals still within an ego based life.

There is also some argument out there about the true nature of Twin flames/Twin souls (which is another name for them) and the Soulmate, which may or may not be the same thing, but is basically in the same ballpark and that ballpark is definitely pre-enlightenment.

I read one thing a while back and it resonated deeply within me as I was almost on the verge of voicing such, or had even done so, but without the clarity of the statement I read. Basically the fellow said that just as we achieve enlightenment our soul  does a little trick where a small part goes back into time and space to aid it's own coming to that point and that, in essence, this is our higher self.

This then made total sense because it was what I had seemed to experience within meditation, helped along by prodigious readings of Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now". It felt and seemed that within meditation the ego fell away and as ones consciousness passed through silence and into stillness that the consciousness became the higher self, and going even further and becoming everything at once within all time and space how could it be otherwise?

So between the paragraph above and now, on this fine Autumnal Sunday morning, I've been out chopping down the Privet trees along one side of the property as the fine roots of these trees have been encroaching on the drains, it's happened twice in about two years and it's gotta stop. And there's a wonderful metaphor going on as the weedy trees of our existence both reach into the sky and dig deep into the soil in search of nourishment’s. The root's would, of course, find the sewers, the deep sub-conscious parts of us tunnelling under the ground unseen carrying our wastes away and a blockage may very well be something we seek to let go of but the trees, growing to the sun, see another use for them.

In this respect the nature of Twin Flames must include past lives, in itself a metaphor chosen by our higher selves to illustrate the edges of our existence and it matter's not that past lives are real or not only that they are the canvas upon which is painted the knowledge we might benefit from unearthing.

So it's seems to me that while the person I might regard as a Twin for myself it is that she too is more metaphorical, maybe the prime metaphor, for the unearthing and bringing to light the unseen and yet to be understood aspects of self which need cleansing, purifying... a good scrub basically, in the journey to source.

And this is what gets me with the concept of the Twin flame. That the person who may or may not be ones Twin flame is still a complete and whole person seeking their own salvation or not and that we, or oneself, cannot see their physicality and corporeality as the source of our salvation... that being with them will not make us whole.

For if one has ever experienced source, or God, or enlightenment or whatever, even for the briefest of moments it is obvious there are no divisions at all between anything, everything and all time and this is, or hints at, the essential paradox within the Twin flame concept.

Myself, I learn by experience. I experience then if I need to seek some knowledge about what may have happened. I find it silly to try and learn something and then experience it as it just feels backwards to me so the Twin Flame thing arrived as a source of knowledge after a whole bunch of previously un-experienced stuff happened and slowly but surely I was led to the ideas of Twin flames and while the Ego driven and earthly delighted parts of me still much alive on the earth embraced such as the fulfilment of all my heart has yearned for I've had enough experience within meditative states and the unfolding of higher self led motivations to understand that the physicality of the thing is as fleeting as all other physicalities.

That as real and existence as all existence is it's still just fun in the little house and sensible detachment is a pre-requisite to overall health; spiritual, mental, physical and all else that might have a bearing, and balance.

The reason I even write this is some vague hope that her which may or may not be might read this and that if she too has had some of that weird and intangible stuff happening to her... that I'm doing all I can to minimise such from my end and that I hope it doesn't hurt.

And that I better get back to chopping down trees and making firewood as what's the old saying... before enlightenment chop wood and carry water, after enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.

Heres a little more reading if you're not already exhausted.