r/Wakingupapp

I heard someone say how people born absolutely 100% blind don't see "black void, complete lack of light" but see "nothing, they see how you see with your elbow".

How would someone born completely blind be able to explain whether they "only see black" or "see nothing" in the first place?

If they don't have anything to compare what they perceive to, if it never changes, how would they explain it as black void or nothing? If they never saw a black object and had people tell them "this is color black".

Is it "nothing" or actually a "black void" they don't have any name for and are used to?

What are you afraid of?

This is the question I’ve been sitting with when the urge/drive to meditate, be mindful, concentrate, or do otherwise classically ‘meditative’ practices comes up.
And it is pretty fascinating what information follows.

This is a hot take for me to speak so generally, but I don’t think meditators really want liberation. We really want a sense of security over our lives. That security is being packaged as awareness, awakening. it supposes that our individual chaotic worlds will become manageable once we are aware enough or mindful enough of nonduality.

This has to be a myth though. Awakening, mindfulness, non-duality, are all at best approximations of what we are calling truth. Each is an inherently static idea. But life is dynamic, ungraspable and uncaring of all our efforts to conceptualize it. Life will take us into the next tragedy, ecstasy, loss and boredom whether we are aware or not.

How do we reach liberation then? The question presumes that we will still be there observing it all when ‘liberation’ is reached. Liberation means liberation from the questioner, so who be there to observe?

When I started with the app a few years ago, I had the impression that you could do direct path practices and awaken in a much shorter time than with the "indirect path" and that after awakening, life might not be perfect, but you would have a sense of liberation. I started to really like the teachings of Loch Kelly, John Wheeler, and David Bingham who teach that there is very little you need to do. John Wheeler in particular said it's very simple and you don't need to go through any process like purifying your mind. That sounded good to me because awakening is not supposed to be just for people that are somehow better and "pure".

But more recently I've been reading and listening to some teachers that make me think that even if you recognize no-self, even if you awaken, if you haven't developed enough concentration to "stay mindful" and haven't done enough meditation to have a peaceful mind, maybe you'll still be reactive and suffer most of the time. Shinzen Young says you have to develop a lot of concentration, clarity, and equanimity. Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo says something like... you need both samatha and vipassana and talks about taming and purifying the mind.

Maybe this explains why I have been going through a very slow, gradual process of becoming more and more able to relax into awareness, but still spend most of my time lost in thought. And it seems to explain why there are so many videos of people telling teachers about how they had it, then lost it, and ask how to get it back, or ask how to stay present. And why John Wheeler's books have so many questions from people that basically say "I know I'm awareness, but..." I'm getting the impression that there are a lot of people that are awakened, or at least can recognize non-duality, but are not very liberated.

What do you think?

Some quotes from Shinzen Young's The Science of Enlightenment:

>If you want to be happy independent of conditions, you’ll need to learn how to have a complete experience of each basic type of body sensation...  When I say, “Have a complete experience of x,” it’s just a quick way of saying, “Experience x with so much concentration, clarity, and equanimity that there’s no time to coagulate x—or yourself—into a thing.” You and x become an integrated flow of energy and spaciousness.

>The basic model for the mindfulness-based spiritual path is to take some type of experience and infuse it with a high degree of concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity... Greeting experiences this way—both in formal practice and as we are doing things in day-to-day life—catalyzes a process of insight and purification... concentration, sensory clarity, and equanimity interact with the experiences of life to speed up a natural process of psychospiritual evolution.

Generally I meditate at night before bed as it helps me sleep and I look forward to getting in at the end of a busy day, so I’m interested to know some of your favourite meditations for sleep.

However I would like to meditate In the morning too, I don’t have much time though and the times I have meditated in the morning I’ve found it makes me want to go back to sleep rather than give me a boost to get my day started.

thanks