Notes on bygone days: fragrance of thoughts and extraordinary efforts.

13.03.2017.

Yesterday morning, while sitting and observing the coming and going of thoughts – mental images – by concentrating on breath, (this cumbersome and verbose sentence was devised in order to avoid the parsimonious ‘meditation’ – one is not doing what Descartes did – or ‘contemplation’; I’m uneasy and equally undecided about the correct term here, although the technical term one should use would be bhāvanā or anāpānsati) I found myself not just being swept along by the current of images, recollections and anticipations, but also accidental bumping into thoughts of genuine interest. Needless to say, I don’t think that the aim of bhāvanā, or sitting in oblivion 坐忘 is the enhancement certain philosophical perceptiveness， although it might be viewed as an accidental by-effect. Nonetheless, it takes place, it happens, it manifests itself, it is presented. I was puzzled and startled for a moment by an idea that some of the thoughts come into the mental field on their own, i.e. they belong to me just by virtue of being thought of at that moment – arrested by momentary attention – but I am not their originator. They are like fragrances blown by the spring breeze that have temporarily found a dwelling space in my consciousness. Today, on the other hand, the thoughts about death visited me. Not the ones tinged by dread or psychological anxiety, but those about the continuity of something ‘after’ the biological death. In addition, in the short moment of who-knows-how-many-seconds the ideas came in successive order:

1) There is continuity of something. Of elements that for the time being might be termed ‘mental’.

2) That ‘I’, ‘self’, ‘ego’, and the awareness of it thereof, indeed ceases to exist. The death is the death of you, death of this soul, and dispersion of these elements.

3) That which continues is a loose federation of forces and qualities that, quite possibly, finds transformation or finds itself transformed into entities/bodies that give rise to awareness, which is neither similar nor different from it.

Needless to say, one could (or should?) object saying that everything I just wrote is simply an unconscious regurgitation of Buddhist theses by the creative force of my brain. What a brain!

23. 03.2017.

The truth conditions, or just a condition, for mystical experiences in particular, and experiences of self-cultivation in general, to be taken as true are not based on devising the best arguments pro et contra. This is not deny that arguments might be important in some specific situations. The conditions are founded in experientiality, i.e. they conform to something that one might call a heuristic invitation of ‘come and see for yourself.’

Paraphrasing Carl Sagan and Laplace: extraordinary experiences require extraordinary effort. (Truth be told, they both would be surprised to find their names mentioned within the paragraph mentioning mysticism.) Genuine spiritual experiences require transcending the totalizing force of the habitual ego, which grasps at everything. Although one might transcend certain aspects of habitual grasping by way of the thought, those are just insubstantial aspects of the affective life of the mind. Transcendence of a philosopher is different from that of a practitioner.