The introduction of small amounts of toxin as a healing act is interesting. Metabolizing the toxins in oneself is central to meditation (if meditation arises naturally, unforced, much like K was saying about intentional meditation not being meditation – all about the motive or the way we handle the activity, whether it is truly sacred or not, the way the impulse to Do something can arise spontaneously as an insight of its own, as an action spilling out from surplus interest and joy, rather than from a deficit seeking relief, escape, conclusion or a resolution through intoxication). Very relevant essay, very excellent, thanks.
I just looked up his references and he tended to use the phrase "conscious meditation is not meditation". I want to look at this statement as a kind of “charm” in the way N. Scott Momaday used the word, a healing application of a small amount of toxin. The statement is a kind of toxin that delivers a painful recognition of a dead end – no amount of conscious effort to be free of thought will free us from thought. That’s what “conscious meditation is not meditation” really means – it’s a dose of healing toxin.
The body/brain often responds to this toxic dose by contorting itself in a painful double-bind. For instance, a person might read that and feel utterly blocked from any direction (futile), so they will feel the toxic futility which is always there and blame the medicine for being the source and not the healing dosage.
We end up picturing often enough that we’re on one side of a locked door, and we’re rattling the door knob in a conscious, but constantly failing effort to get out, to get past our own effort, to escape ourselves.
The “other side” of the door is a chimera of effortless release. And it can drive a person crazy to feel they’re on one side and not on the preferred side. How do you move, what can be done, etc? And all you feel is a (rather slapstick, but we don’t appreciate it at the time) longing to stop longing for something more, a conscious will to stop being willful, etc. It can leave you hanging on the door seemingly forever, stuck between myself as an repetitive machine and myself as an ideal. An infinite rake-handle/head collision that can’t be stopped.
What makes us fall out of this illusion at least temporarily can be music, art, dance, but I hold a special regard for words, because they are the Most toxic element of performance. They have been poisoned for millennium by deceit. Therefore they are very potent medicine as well. But they need to be taken in extremely small doses (I don't mean short essays, I mean they can't be allowed to linger beyond their shelf life, which is almost instantaneous. They have to melt in the mouth like M&Ms as we read, each sentence dissolving into alterations of our being as we read.
The right words in the right place in the rightly prepared mind are transformations of meaning into a change in Being, as Bohm implied. If they are held too long in the "brain", they fall back heavily as concrete concepts and become stuck in place as dogmas or fetishes of meaning. This becomes mere informational learning, but learning as a cleansing of the toxic beams of perception requires moving past information into action. {This is what I talked about in Defeating the Predator}.
Words can also zero in on the viruses of confused thinking (the compressed layers of toxic words) that form the hardened elements of the ancient beams that are blinding us. But words are tremendously difficult to use artfully because the toxin must be distilled and applied in perfect measure, or they just spread the sickness and have no healing art within them.
And the pathways to receive this medicine are clogged with toxic words. So the first thing the charm does is scrape some of these toxic elements into the bloodstream of consciousness, where they are perceived as painful feelings of contradiction. How can we possibly "pursue" "unconscious" meditation? It's a contradiction. A futility. And the discomfort rolls into an auto-immune response of resistance to facing the futility long enough for it dissipate.
What we don't notice at first (because the healing toxins in the charm work at a subtle level) is that we've already been spontaneously awakened to our own contradictions whether we like it or not. The charm has alerted us to the perpetual presence of futility in the bloodstream. The auto-immune resistance may be even worse now but that’s a sign that the medicine is working. Because now we’re aware of our toxic condition and toxically trying harder than ever to resist it, which makes us feel sicker. But this is how the futility is making itself known.
Underlying all this pain, something has immediately ceased to resist the resistance of resistance. The medicinal value of the charm has already begun operating in a manner that is not resisting or in opposition to anything. The charm has set into motion without our choice or will a capacity to turn and face every contradiction that comes up. We may hate the charm, we might find it repetitive and something “we already know!” But we don’t actually know the charm’s full meaning. It hasn’t yet been transformed into a new way of being. But it is already doing its work.
We are now interested in our toxic situation and that’s a shift. This medicine is not in battle with the ancient automatic (toxic) system of recoil and escape. It is freeing it from the bone marrow and releasing it into the bloodstream of awareness, where it can be metabolized and made harmless. And that is the beginning of meditation, but it gets much more interesting as it unfolds.
In scanning for the phrase "conscious meditation is not meditation" (notice the negation, which is typical of charms) I found this relevant conversation. Krishnamurti · The Relationship Between the Mind and the Brain (kfoundation.org)
The introduction of small amounts of toxin as a healing act is interesting. Metabolizing the toxins in oneself is central to meditation (if meditation arises naturally, unforced, much like K was saying about intentional meditation not being meditation – all about the motive or the way we handle the activity, whether it is truly sacred or not, the way the impulse to Do something can arise spontaneously as an insight of its own, as an action spilling out from surplus interest and joy, rather than from a deficit seeking relief, escape, conclusion or a resolution through intoxication). Very relevant essay, very excellent, thanks.
I just looked up his references and he tended to use the phrase "conscious meditation is not meditation". I want to look at this statement as a kind of “charm” in the way N. Scott Momaday used the word, a healing application of a small amount of toxin. The statement is a kind of toxin that delivers a painful recognition of a dead end – no amount of conscious effort to be free of thought will free us from thought. That’s what “conscious meditation is not meditation” really means – it’s a dose of healing toxin.
The body/brain often responds to this toxic dose by contorting itself in a painful double-bind. For instance, a person might read that and feel utterly blocked from any direction (futile), so they will feel the toxic futility which is always there and blame the medicine for being the source and not the healing dosage.
We end up picturing often enough that we’re on one side of a locked door, and we’re rattling the door knob in a conscious, but constantly failing effort to get out, to get past our own effort, to escape ourselves.
The “other side” of the door is a chimera of effortless release. And it can drive a person crazy to feel they’re on one side and not on the preferred side. How do you move, what can be done, etc? And all you feel is a (rather slapstick, but we don’t appreciate it at the time) longing to stop longing for something more, a conscious will to stop being willful, etc. It can leave you hanging on the door seemingly forever, stuck between myself as an repetitive machine and myself as an ideal. An infinite rake-handle/head collision that can’t be stopped.
What makes us fall out of this illusion at least temporarily can be music, art, dance, but I hold a special regard for words, because they are the Most toxic element of performance. They have been poisoned for millennium by deceit. Therefore they are very potent medicine as well. But they need to be taken in extremely small doses (I don't mean short essays, I mean they can't be allowed to linger beyond their shelf life, which is almost instantaneous. They have to melt in the mouth like M&Ms as we read, each sentence dissolving into alterations of our being as we read.
The right words in the right place in the rightly prepared mind are transformations of meaning into a change in Being, as Bohm implied. If they are held too long in the "brain", they fall back heavily as concrete concepts and become stuck in place as dogmas or fetishes of meaning. This becomes mere informational learning, but learning as a cleansing of the toxic beams of perception requires moving past information into action. {This is what I talked about in Defeating the Predator}.
Words can also zero in on the viruses of confused thinking (the compressed layers of toxic words) that form the hardened elements of the ancient beams that are blinding us. But words are tremendously difficult to use artfully because the toxin must be distilled and applied in perfect measure, or they just spread the sickness and have no healing art within them.
And the pathways to receive this medicine are clogged with toxic words. So the first thing the charm does is scrape some of these toxic elements into the bloodstream of consciousness, where they are perceived as painful feelings of contradiction. How can we possibly "pursue" "unconscious" meditation? It's a contradiction. A futility. And the discomfort rolls into an auto-immune response of resistance to facing the futility long enough for it dissipate.
What we don't notice at first (because the healing toxins in the charm work at a subtle level) is that we've already been spontaneously awakened to our own contradictions whether we like it or not. The charm has alerted us to the perpetual presence of futility in the bloodstream. The auto-immune resistance may be even worse now but that’s a sign that the medicine is working. Because now we’re aware of our toxic condition and toxically trying harder than ever to resist it, which makes us feel sicker. But this is how the futility is making itself known.
Underlying all this pain, something has immediately ceased to resist the resistance of resistance. The medicinal value of the charm has already begun operating in a manner that is not resisting or in opposition to anything. The charm has set into motion without our choice or will a capacity to turn and face every contradiction that comes up. We may hate the charm, we might find it repetitive and something “we already know!” But we don’t actually know the charm’s full meaning. It hasn’t yet been transformed into a new way of being. But it is already doing its work.
We are now interested in our toxic situation and that’s a shift. This medicine is not in battle with the ancient automatic (toxic) system of recoil and escape. It is freeing it from the bone marrow and releasing it into the bloodstream of awareness, where it can be metabolized and made harmless. And that is the beginning of meditation, but it gets much more interesting as it unfolds.
In scanning for the phrase "conscious meditation is not meditation" (notice the negation, which is typical of charms) I found this relevant conversation. Krishnamurti · The Relationship Between the Mind and the Brain (kfoundation.org)