Hi!
I hesitate to post about cognition, meditation, self-enquiry, and mindfulness related topics for numerous reasons. Yet, I have some things I want to share.
I was thinking - what if people find it weird? Who am I to say I have answers? I have stories about my experience and what-ifs. Nothing I say may be replicable or applicable or constant between different people, right?
Yet, at the same time, we get people online repeating junk online like “those who know do not speak” to silence discussion (or otherwise quoting Buddhist texts at you that they often missed the nuance of). I feel these are the people that really do not know.
My interest is the understanding the mind and its potential, not documents. To understand, we must share widely, cross-reference, read widely, and knowledge must keep evolving. So I’ll try to share what I wanted to say as coherently as I can.
First, an important musical forward and the hook to my whole post! This will put things into perspective for the series of posts to follow.
On Mountains And Streams
The Allman Brothers epic and long instrumental Mountain Jam, of which I’m a fan and have known for like twenty plus years, takes the melody from Donovan’s “First There Was A Mountain”. This I didn’t know until recently!
The ABB song is great, though you may prefer Whipping Post, because it completely rocks by comparison and this one is more repetitive, but it’s got a good groove for sure. Anyhow, a snippet of Donnovan’s lyrics after the ABB song link:
The Donovan Lyrics (you don’t have to listen if you don’t want to):
First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is
First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is
Ok, that’s a bit more spaced out, right? Well, the Donovan quote is itself a reference to the Zen writings of Qingyuan Weixin, apparently in the 9th century:
Before a man studies Zen, to him mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after he gets an insight into the truth of Zen through the instruction of a good master, mountains to him are not mountains and waters are not waters; but after this when he really attains to the abode of rest, mountains are once more mountains and waters are waters.
For what you may have originally associated with southern rock, that’s deep.
I feel the first part of the quote clearly describes what many might call Kenshō or stream entry - I don’t want to mince terms but I’ll discuss what I think the event, symptoms, and changes in cognition it produces and try to contrast it to what people think it is. The second part seemingly describes integration after parts of the mind are split and then reconnected, having experienced the split, and how things are different after. Things are the same as before, but also different.
To really understand both mental events, we have to decouple them from what various religious figures and scholars have written about them, while also respecting the great work they have done for thousands of years on this subject in various traditions. We have to explore what they feel like and what they do - both good, bad, and frustrating - and test them the best we can (which Budda also seemingly encouraged in the Pali Canon).
Internet partisans will say “the experience doesn’t matter”, implying only what you get from the experience matters, and then will tell you what you got from the experience doesn’t matter, and “keep going” or worse “get a teacher”. This helps no one that is navigating the experience, or wonders whether the mental neurosurgery is worth performing or even wanted. I will say this answer is “it depends” and “not always”. I think sharing is important.
People meditate everywhere without knowing what they are doing, and where it goes. Did they even want to go there and were they ready? Sometimes this happens without meditation. Sometimes people just want to know what a thing really is without going there.
As I feel this post will get too long, and I also want to discuss things about the subconcious I’m sort of encountering by way of oblique methods - namely the Chinese martial arts of Baguazhang and Yiquan (the benefits are largely physical, but still, it’s cognitively super interesting) - I need to break this up into many parts (at least 3 more?)
Stay tuned, more to come.