Originally posted by knightmeister
Whoah! Hang on a minute! Am I to take from this that your experience of the "Buddha mind" is that of experiencing the presence of the Buddha himself in the room with you?
When I say experience , I do not mean an interior or internal emotional or conceptual experience. I mean an EXTERIOR experience as well. One experiences the Holy Spirit as being i enlightening" , he said "there will I be amongst you" . He actually meant it as well.
Whoah! Hang on a minute! Am I to take from this that your experience of the "Buddha mind" is that of experiencing the presence of the Buddha himself in the room with you?
Absolutely not. I did not say “an experience of the Buddha.” Buddha-mind is a term used to designate being in a certain state of awareness.
When I say experience , I do not mean an interior or internal emotional or conceptual experience. I mean an EXTERIOR experience as well. One experiences the Holy Spirit as being in the room and also within oneself. Many would call this madness but I doubt you feel that the Buddha is still alive and communing with his followers maybe you do. I think you might be talking about "enlightenment" and "consciousness" whereas I am talking about a real presence.
When we see an image in our visual cortex, our brain operates to “project” that image back into the exterior world, so to speak: to the location it identifies as the source-point of the sensory data from which it constructed the visual image that we perceive.
Any experience can be so imaged, projected and exteriorized by the mind. Even dreams sometimes seem so real to the dreamer—including “exterior” aspects and images, such as people, houses, etc.
People whose mind “translates” (again, see my post to Nordlys) from the non-conceptual experience of reality to Krishna being present with them—well, do you accord that the same reality that you do with the presence of Christ. After all, their experience seems as real to them as yours does to you: a real external presence of the real Krishna. Or do you deconstruct their claims, from the perspective of your own religious conclusions, in a similar manner as I am doing with yours?
Now, you conclude that your experience is that of a real external presence. My point is that that is the result of how your mind translated the experience, with that translation subsequently (or perhaps a priori) assessed in terms of a particular set of religious beliefs and claims—themselves likely originally based upon similar translations of similar experiences by people from earlier times.
Even if your conclusion is correct, that is more or less the process. You may or may not have been predisposed to a certain kind of translation by prior religious experience, upbringing, etc. I am not claiming that you were.
The point is: there is an experience, there is a translation into certain mental content (e.g., a presence), and there is an assessment of that translation based on other concepts, beliefs, etc., etc. The mind plays an active (not simply a receptive) role in
all of that.
The Zen masters caution one to treat all such translations as
makyo: bedeviling illusions. I am not so severe. However, behind all the makings of the mind (images, ideas, concepts, thoughts, words, symbols), there is the ineffable ground, in which and of which we are, prior to all conceptualizations. What we conclude from that is what
we conclude from that, on whatever basis, for whatever reasons. That is the “thing”; the rest is what we think about it.
_____________________________________
EDIT: Of course there is a sense of presence: we are immersed in presence (of which we ourselves are). That does not mean that there is a singular, supernatural, person present—even if our minds translate it thus in the midst of the immediate experience.
That is, I am talking about translation prior to consciously thinking about it. But even as such translation begins, we are floating back from the raw awareness into concept-representations. The key is to either (a) not follow that process, and return to non-conceptual awareness; or (b) to go ahead and follow it, but know that’s what you’re doing. Simply become acclimated to what I called the “ground-state” of non-conceptual awareness, and then you can observe from there how mental images, feelings, concepts arise—including that of a personal presence.
Then you can decide whether the translations of your mind are accurate. Until then, it is simply an assumption, qualitatively not much different from the assumption that the desert heat waves are really an oasis over there, even though one is in fact hallucinating. (I only use the word “hallucination” here as an egregiously erroneous translation.) One cannot tell just from the content; no matter how many people have translated the experience into similar content.
I conclude that translating the sense of presence into a singular person-presence is a mirage, based upon my own experience of moving in and out of that ground-state; you conclude that it is not. I am suggesting that you dig deeper, experientially, into the basis of that conclusion; you may still come to the same conclusion. But it won’t be based on the assumption that what seems external in fact is external, or that your mind plays no creative role in translating the experience into representational content.
May all your plans be thwarted...
24 Nov '07 22:20
Back to Top