What is the point of life-and-death?

Kate - "a way to keep the adult in the room so you don't have to fall asleep alone in the dark" hit home for me personally. I recognize that impulse in myself looking back over years of life and wandering spiritual seeking. But only in the past year or two do I think I've begun to spot it easily and recognize it for what it is: when I hit rough patches and I start having imaginary conversations with teachers in my head, trying to formulate a question that I can't quite put a finger on. And then I spot it: I'm trying to find a hand-hold, resisting the persistent (sometimes relentless, sometimes daunting) Unknowing. The questions I'm formulating are irrelevant and have no relevant answers - they are just pointers to that resistance.

Thanks for saying it so simply. It's helpful to me to have it phrased like that.

Kate: what Ona said. Wow--- that really hits the nail on the head for me too. Such a good delaying tactic, the questioning and wondering and ultimately the *seeking* itself can be. Because free falling in the dark can seem quite a daunting possibility till I notice it's what's always been happening anyway---- may as well enjoy the fierce beauty of total vulnerability...

Thanks, guys-- the upside of "free falling in the dark can seem quite a daunting possibility till I notice it's what's always been happening anyway" is just this repeated discovery of things you didn't know you knew, until they pop out of your mouth, or up on the screen of your computer...

wheee!

Kate, First off, I love reading your posts. They're so poetic. I feel like this is the kind of writing that jabs me into a different awareness and understanding when I'm perfectly ready. Adyashanti's book Emptiness Dancing did that for me recently. I had a baker's dozen of mini-realizations.

I've been sitting on a job that I don't intend to spend the rest of my
life at, waiting for some kind of feeling to pop up inside me, some
kind of readiness, ripeness. My I-Ching reading tells me to "Retreat",
wait, while I assess my strengths. This is EXACTLY how I feel. It
feels right not to move yet. I suspect it will feel different when it's time to move. It's that ripeness that blooms. The "shifting, subjective" feeling--I can
identify with that. In fact, it's the foundation of the I-Ching.

@chris - divination is interesting, in that I have found it can be prescriptive (what one should do) but often it can be equally descriptive (where one is now). One has to rely on ones own intuition, of course, but I've been generally quite helped by occasional use of Tarot cards to shed light on what I'm missing, what's going on in my practice, etc. But deciding whether "love" "letting go" "retreating" "struggle" or other themes/symbols that come up in the cards are descriptive of where I am now, or what will come next... depends. (I usually just use single card readings, rather than doing the past-present-future or more complex layouts other people use).

I am not sure how to do that. Seems the only thing I can do is practice and see what happens.

For the more 'action-figures' among us, to retreat, to wait-- can be the ultimate 'leap.' Trusting my own intuition's almost-inaudible whispers has been my biggest challenge and leap of faith. The rarest thing to find externally is encouragement to trust my own path even when it doesn't look like an 'expert's' or any known tradition. Can anyone mention a teacher who has said-- 'What you're saying is totally unlike my experience; but something about how you're saying it... You GO!'

Jack, why do your posts always come out like you are quoting yourself, in the little box? What secrets of formatting do you have that we do not?

-ona

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No idea why it is coming out that way. Let me try something.

Jack

Jack, why do your posts always come out like you are quoting yourself, in the little box? What secrets of formatting do you have that we do not?

-ona

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This time I posted it. Then I went back edited it and then posted it.

Jack

Those last two look normal.

I believe when our conscious self feels threatened and real issues such as allviating suffering comes up, it diverts us by bringing up extraneous issues such as: What is the meaning of life? What happens after we die? And so on. Living from our non-conceptual, unconscious space threatens our conscious self by bypassing it. I think that is why the Buddha didn't answer these questions.



Keeping asking those, to me, unanswerable questions is still worthwhile because it eventually shows the limitations of this conscious self. What was your face before you were born?

jack

Maybe the system thinks everything I post is so important and earthshaking that it highlights it. Nah.

jack

A person is hardly going to be persuaded to do anything (change jobs, divorce, move, marry, buy orange juice, meditate, etc.) by a dream, a divination reading, the advice of friends, the advice of strangers, a self-help book or any other source of information unless they are ready to do that thing anyway.

We hear and see what fits with what we need or want to hear and see at any moment.

I tend to cringe a bit at the "escaping responsibility" wording, Chris, as I only ever hear that phrasing in the context of people being judgemental of other people's lives.

What I'm thinking is that the excuses are irrelevant. They are just post-decision chatter, like any other inner narrative. They aren't a cause of not making a change. When the person decides to do something else, they will generate justification/story for that, too. If they are theistic, they might use the God's Will line. If they aren't, they might say "I feel like it now."

(PS - plug for our great meditation excuses generator: http://meditationexcus.es/ )

That's the point I was making, Ona. I may decide to take path x, and then find a way to justify that path using some external authority.


-cmarti

My point being external authority excuses are in the same category as non-external authority excuses. "I did it because I wanted to" and "I did it because it's God's Will" mean exactly the same thing, in a practical sense.

To be more specific, a person who would murder "because God told me to" would murder even if they were an atheist. They would just give a differently worded excuse.

(quirky forum duplicated my reply)