Lessons In The Key Of Life: The Power Of Awareness
Last week, I gave an overview of the Cycle of Improvement, touching briefly on each of the elements. Over the next few articles we will explore the...
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Susan Smalley: Practice, Practice: How To Hone Your Meditation Skills
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I think many people, in both East and West, miss out on some humorous aspect of Tao Te Ching.
It is not at all clear to those who study TTC that LAo Tzu was entirely serious about some things he wrote.
People who attain enlightenment often realize the futility of transmitting experience thru' discursive means. Spiritually advanced, when wishing to speak at all, use artistic means: poetry, sound, fables, songs, parables. The very essence of art is ability of adopting contradiction. Not "either" A "or" B, but A "either and"B.
I's nice to read an article by a beginning meditator. The person who runs this blog ( hint) should also invite advanced spiritual practitioners to post their insights.
What is a "spiritual practitoner?"
What is a "spiritual practitoner?"
Not a person who looks for word definitions :-)
But seriously, a spiritual practitoner, to me, is a person who is involved in regular meditative practice and has achieved certain level of wisdom because of it.
Yes and No...Meditation means to drop the mind, it means no mind.
No ideas, no clever insights, no struggle against what you want to do, or who you want to be. Of trying to control the mind, of forcing thoughts away, of giving them more energy to create more and more divisions in the self ad infinitum. Of struggeling with yourself daily, to try and do something because you "think" it's good for you.
No goals, and above all else no future.
Because mind always lives in the future, and once that is severed, then there is no past.
anything else is just self hypnosis.
You might as well go into hibernation
Considering whats in store for the next four years, that isn't such a bad idea.
How does religious music or musical chanting affect meditation?
That would depend on the meditation.
How do you turn off a catchy tune while meditating?
Any number of ways such as counting the inhalations one through 9 and start over at one again ( stopping at ten is to easy and robotic). or it sometimes works well to SHOUT!
Why after some excitement it is difficult to calm oneself immediately?
Because we are not robots we settle into our practice with more ease as our practice matures.
Lol.Sorry lost of concentration.
Should read; 3. You don't ignore those feelings that arise.
1. Chanting is usually monotous this is to develop concentration. You may have got mix up with the two.
2. To take your mind off the tune and replace it something else is escapism. You do this in the beginning as a preliminary in order to develop concentration. In meditation proper you do not do this.
3. You don't those feelings that arise.