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2016, Realm of Awareness VOL 7
By becoming aware of awareness we can experience the innermost sense or the felt sense of spaciousness and self-illumination. Within this state of open awareness, the openness of spacious luminous awareness, we can enter the experience of the radiance of light as energy through the sublime, luminous vibrations. The experience of the unfolding of sublime awareness and the corresponding energetic manifestation of the self-arising of primordial awareness is self-liberation. These experiences of the sublime manifestation of luminous energy was described by the 14 th century Dzogchen master Longchenpa in his text Precious Treasury of The Genuine Meaning. This meditative experience often arises spontaneously in Dzogchen meditation practice. This experience of translucent energetic manifestation is also described in Chan Buddhism, Hindu Kashmir Shavism, and Yan Xin Qi Gong. This experience of energetic manifestation can be experienced within subtle forms of respiration. Sometimes the ongoing sense of subtle luminous respiration can be experienced even as there is a profound sense of breathlessness. Breathlessness used here means no breath or minimal breath. This experience of the ongoing sense of respiration without breath is very powerful and empowering. In this experience of vast stillness there is no breath and yet there arises from deep within, a most subtle respiration within the breathlessness. During this respiration of stillness, the body seems to breathe and be breathed by most subtle inner wind. The inner sense of stillness expands and extends throughout the entire body and beyond the body's boundaries. This stillness opens us into the dimension of potential space, the dharmakaya and pure awareness.
Mindfulness, 2016
Working on the assumption that the average healthy individual completes 15 breath cycles each minute, an individual that is fortunate enough to live until they are 100 years old will take approximately 786 million in breaths and the same number of out-breaths. From the meditator’s perspective, this equates to almost 1.6 billion opportunities to attain enlightenment. The breath, when correctly observed and attended to, can become a potent means of cultivating awakened perception. However, despite the numerous opportunities provided by the process of breathing to become more spiritually aware, it is unfortunately the case that there exist a significant number of people that live out their entire life without being aware of a single breath in or out. The breath can be used in meditation to collect, calm and focus the mind. Using this meditative calm as a basis, the breath can then be used to cultivate insight into the true nature of reality. In our experience, it is important that the meditation unfolds in this sequence. If an individual attempts to investigate the true nature of reality with a mind that lacks clarity and focus, it is inevitable that the outcome of their investigation will be confused. Therefore, as a given meditation session progresses, there should be a gradual ‘opening up’ of awareness and a smooth transition from a form of meditative awareness that is more focused on establishing mental stability, to one that is more orientated towards meditative investigation.
Philosophies, 2021
A philosopher and a cognitive neuroscientist conversed with Buddhist lama Tilmann Lhundrup Borghardt (TLB) about the unresolved phenomenological concerns and logical questions surrounding “pure” consciousness or minimal phenomenal experience (MPE), a quasi-contentless, non-dual state whose phenomenology of “emptiness” is often described in terms of the phenomenal quality of luminosity that experienced meditators have reported occurs in deep meditative states. Here, we present the excerpts of the conversation that relate to the question of how it is possible to first have and later retrieve such non-dual states of selflessness and timelessness that are unrelated to sensory input. According to TLB, a “pure” experience of consciousness contains the phenomenal quality of luminous clarity, which is experienced solely in the transitional phase from the non-dual state of absolute emptiness to the state of minimal emptiness, when the person gradually returns to duality. However, this qualit...
Realms Of Awareness VOL 7, 2016
The felt sense of whoness is not a me-ness…me is self-fixation and in fact the sense of whoness can free us from objectified self-fixation. The sense of me often replaces the sense of who. When the experiential nonconceptual felt sense of who is not known or experienced, the felt sense of me-ness arises desperately. The sense of who is unfixatedness and this innate sense of no-thingness can be found and even experienced as ongoing timeless awareness in time. Innermost awareness in its manifestation can be experienced as whoness, no-thingness and open knowingness. The sense of me-ness is self-fixated, self-referencing and this me-ness can obscure the experiential arising of whoness. The sense of me-ness reflects the being in mind alone, and the sense of whoness reflects being deeply within the awareness field. Whoness manifests most directly as pause and within the pause. The pause is unbound in betweeness…the space in between..transitional spaciousness. When the spaciousness of the breathless breath opens whoness can be felt as uncontained and unbound. Whoness is experiential openness….openess without a name or prior to name. We may say openness prior to mind. Dasein to use Heideggarian language. When the breathless breath manifests the experience is always mysterious. What does breathless breath mean? Breathless means no breath, there is no breath. The word breath here, in this context signifies that there is no breath but there is respiration. There is this inner most experience of no breath, no inhaling or exhaling of air and yet there is respiration. There is a respiration without breath and beyond breath. For instance, in the Kechari mudra this breathless breath experience takes place. The breath stops and yet there is an inner sense of breathless respiration. This experience of respiration without breath is described in various traditions of eastern philosophy. In the Dzogchen tradition Longchenpa describes the experience in his great text Words and Meaning. This
Transmission: Journal of the Awareness Field - Vol. 6 Self Liberation in Phenomenology and Dzogchen , 2013
1997
The nature of breathing and the potential use of breath experiments or exercises has over the past 70 years raised a great deal of controversy in various schools of somatic psychology and education, spiritual training, and mystical transformation. The common stereotype in Western somatic psychology that most Eastern' breathing practices are disembodied" is more a matter of emphasis than substance. The attitudes of somatic pioneers Elsa Gindler, Gerda Alexander, Wilhelm Reich, and F M. Alexander suggest a dialogue with those in the Vijnana Bhairava Sutra of the Yoga tradition and from the Chishti Sufi tradition with regards to the relationship of breath awareness to neuroticism, schizophrenia, and visionary states of awareness. A functional dialogue between the various models can be explored by approaching breathing experiments in an integrated fashion, which involves proprioceptive awareness, emotional feeling, and conscious movement with awareness of surroundings.
Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2019
Are there universal structures or stages of experience, socalled contemplative landmarks, that unfold during meditative practice? As commonly described in contemplative manuals or handbooks, there is a transition from a form of meditation where the subject must exert continual effort in order for consciousness to remain focused. As Kenneth Rose has recently shown, these manuals, stemming from the Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian traditions, agree that a transition will take place from effortful meditation into a state where attention is fixed or locked in on the meditation object. This article describes the micro-phenomenology of this phenomenon, sometimes called dhyana or access concentration, from the first-person perspective. This study both confirms and refines the traditional account, engaging with certain difficulties involved in establishing a correspondence between traditional, clear-cut, and sometimes contradictory concepts and actual experiences, which can be hard to conceptualize precisely
Investigating the Depths of Consciousness Through Meditation
This article explores the theory and practice of a contemplative phenomenology. In general, contemplative phenomenology investigates and describes the activity and effects of meditation. Drawing on William James, I suggest that meditation can be understood as involving “lowering the threshold” of consciousness. This includes, among other things, opening up access to unconscious processes. I exemplify an interdisciplinary approach to this idea by combining a recent remote associates test with first-person accounts. Based on further such accounts (historical and contemporary), I develop an outline of the forms of contemplative depth-experience. Taking a cue from Hegel, I argue that understanding deep contemplative experience may require a specific form of conceptuality characterized by synthetic universals. In contemplation this conceptuality can also manifest itself directly in the perceptual system, giving rise to an experience of transcending time and space. The results of this investigation provide an overview of the depths of contemplative experience primarily based on first-person accounts.
Transmission: The Journal of the Awareness Field, Vol.9 The Realm of Immanence, 2018
In this chapter, I focus on phenomenological reduction and reflective meditation in the Advaita Vedānta system. Many Advaita Vedānta traditions and texts guide meditation, but here I discuss only one 14th-century text, the Dṛgdṛśyaviveka: An Inquiry into the Nature of the 'Seer' and the 'Seen' (Vidyāraṇya 1931), hereafter "DDV", primarily because it gives a clear summary of the traditional approach within Advaita Vedānta and facilitates the intended dialogue. The objective is not to explore the scope of phenomenology, nor to address meditative techniques and philosophical arguments in Advaita Vedānta, but to develop a conversation between phenomenology and Advaita Vedānta. Phenomenological reduction was introduced by Husserl and later discussed by Fink, to liberate one from dogmatic convictions, to discover the essence as it is. This is a method of returning to 'the thing as such', free from conceptual parameters. For Husserl, scientific inquiry demands an investigator bracket all the imposed factors to be isolated from the pure world or 'things themselves' (1998). This process is one of going back to the world free of contamination by assumptions and methods, whether scientific or psychological. Significant to this are the moments of epoché or abstention, and of the reduction proper, a process that brings the inquiry back to consciousness. Husserl sought here to overcome the chasm between consciousness (subject) and world (object), without requiring this to be mediated by categories, as with Kantian epistemology. The process culminates in exposing the state where no distinction remains between consciousness and object, noesis and noema. This erasure of the gap led some to equate systems like Advaita and Yoga with phenomenology. Our openness to comparing the systems stems from the conviction that even when philosophies differ, their scientific methods can overlap, and sometimes, a comparative approach makes exploring the nuances easier. Though systems remain separate, dialogue among them is promising for future philosophy. Just as there are objections to phenomenological methods being unable to serve as a bridge and remaining Cartesian, similar objections can be made to Advaita taking arguments too far, to solipsism and subjective illusionism. The scope of this paper, again, is to explore the philosophy of meditation as championed by Husserl and Śaṅkara (8th-century ce India), relying on a secondary text, DDV, to synthesize the system of Śaṅkara, who may be considered the Classical Indian period equivalent of Greek
Unpublished master's thesis. (Turkish.) Ege University, Institute of Social Sciences, Turkic History Program, Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Osman Karatay., 2023
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