From our usual (left-hemisphere-dominant) perspective, Mystics sound strange, unreasonable, even disturbed. One famous mystic's quote - which in light of today's escalating wars in the Ukraine & middle East, and rapidly-worsening environmental crises - comes across as counterintuitive & wildly optimistic:
"All shall be well,
and all shall be well,
and all manner of things shall be well." Julian of Norwich (1342 – 1416) English Christian mystic
We have many clues to why mystics see things so differently than we typically do:
“So long as one is merely on the surface of things, they are always imperfect, unsatisfactory, incomplete. Penetrate into the substance and everything is perfect, complete, whole.”
Philip Kapleau. “The Zen of Living and Dying. A Practical and Spiritual Guide.” Shambhala, 1998.
"Without the arising and subsiding of thoughts,
there is a naturally limpid, pristine state,
like the unwavering evenness of a limpid ocean.
Free of the occurrence of or involvement in thoughts,
free of hope or fear,
you abide within the state of naturally occurring timeless awareness,
the true nature of which is profoundly lucid."
Longchenpa
We usually conflate "thinking" with "reason," our "internal dialogue" ("self-talk") AND EVEN our actual identity - who we are!! But then we can also be poets, musicians, artists, meditators, mystics & saints. It's as if we are two very different people, depending on HOW we attend to our environment, others & ourselves.
WHEN we assume that we are separate individuals, competing to survive alone in a hostile, chaotic, meaningless dead world, our attention becomes narrowly focused on trying to control our (mostly uncontrollable) material environment. This is left-hemisphere dominance. In this mode of attending, which is almost universal in our present day, stressed-out, materialist society, we lock into quick & dirty black & white thinking for survival & pleasure, dismissing & disregarding anything complex, subtle, or nuanced, like spirituality & mysticism.
On the other hand, WHEN we're able to use BOTH hemispheres of our brain in a BALANCED way, then we can control what is controllable AND are able to enjoy life in context of the BIG PICTURE, and thus experience Oneness with other human beings, animals, plants & the cosmos (Universal Consciousness or Self) in a kind, loving, collaborative manner.
"There’s some very nice research which shows, at least implicitly, that our thinking begins ((in the right hemisphere)) at a pre-linguistic level which is a sense of a gestalt, in other words of a shape or form, an analogy, a metaphor of something, that our thinking is embodied in a, if you like, nonverbal, visual, or kinesthetic way, bringing all our senses to bear.
And the next stage is that we allow the left hemisphere’s language centers to process that in language. But that’s only an intermediate step.
In order to understand it fully, whatever has been made explicit, then has to be reabsorbed or taken up again by the right hemisphere’s global understanding and made sense of again in context.”
Iain McGilchrist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD7BHJHkufY .
Most of us are unknowingly completely lost in, hypnotized by, & identified with the internal dialogue (self-talk) - as if in 'arrested development,' at the noisy, most obvious, intermediate phase of the thinking process (mentioned above). Meditation teachers & mystics consistently try to help us release our obsession with mind chatter, COMPLETE OUR THINKING PROCESS, and THUS be able to embody our far wiser, silent, witnessing Universal Intelligence. This is often compared to shifting from the choppy waves on the surface to the deep silent still depths of the ocean.
More on "self talk": http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=self-talk and http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=Weber .
Self-inquiry is an advanced spiritual practice specifically to dis-identify from all those sticky phenomena which cause unnecessary suffering but are actually transient, and do not represent who we truly are: wise, silent, witnessing Universal Intelligence. More on "self-inquiry": http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=Self-inquiry
I HIGHLY recommend the first 23 minutes of Helen Hamilton's : “The Shortest Path to Freedom!” to help you shift from mere intellectual understanding (& flipping back & forth between peace & suffering) to directly experiencing Self (progressively deeper, more stable peace & joy) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiyxRc9CMlY
 |
| Heart - Art by Jean-Pierre Weill from "The Well of Being" |
No comments:
Post a Comment