#762 Overview of the Meditative Path

     While busy raising a family, establishing a career, and coping with the effects of various traumas, little time or energy remains to get one's bearings. A recent radio show: "The Death of Leisure" discussed how current societal pressures & priorities are so narrowly focused on productivity (work), that opportunities to "think about how to pursue the things we value" are disappearing. "So how do we reconfigure our relationship to the time we have and open it up so we can pursue the good life?" https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-death-of-leisure-1.5470259
     A small proportion of us do seek out, and do obtain symptomatic relief from stress through meditation, including mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR).
     After children have grown & become independent, career has peaked (or starts winding down), and psychological issues have more or less resolved, a gnawing "lack" often still remains - or becomes more pressing than ever before. 
     But because most of us have so exclusively devoted ourselves to "productivity," our profession becomes our entire identity, so we often find ourselves lost & feeling empty by middle-age, and especially after we retire. So some swear "I'll never retire"; some quickly go back to work after a very brief retirement; and some very quickly die after retirement. The momentum of a lifetime of constant struggle & striving for financial security, material success & professional respect is powerful & enduring. 
     All life transitions are challenging, perhaps especially retirement: loss of identity; diminished prestige, income, control & social contacts; diminishing physical & mental health; fear of death; and perhaps the most frightening of all - becoming consciously aware (perhaps for the first time) of what's actually going on. Retirement is an inherent part of wise aging - something in which most of us have ZERO training, knowledge, or even interest. http://www.johnlovas.com/2011/12/successful-aging.html

     Serious meditation practice can help us far more than we can imagine:

      “Beginning meditation may be difficult. Just sitting immobile for a half hour can be arduous at first and intensive practice over a period of days can be powerful and at times disconcerting. Any unresolved psychological conflicts tend to surface as soon as attention is turned inward and the restless agitated nature of the untrained mind rapidly becomes apparent. Powerful surges of arousal and emotion may alternate with deep peace and joy.
     Even a few hours of intensive practice can easily demonstrate that our usual levels of awareness and perception are grossly insensitive, distorted, and outside voluntary control. Indeed, it rapidly becomes apparent that our usual degree of voluntary control of psychological processes is far less than commonly assumed. Amazingly enough, we can live a whole lifetime without recognizing the fact that these perceptual processes continuously control, create, and distort our reality as well as our ideas of who and what we are. Most people who have tried would probably agree that training the mind and bringing it under voluntary control is one of the most difficult tasks a person can undertake.
     The rewards of meditative practice tend to be subtle at first. Increased calm, sensitivity, receptivity, empathy, insight, and clarity are some of the qualities that may be experienced early as a result of regular practice. Old assumptions about oneself and the world are gradually surrendered, and more finely tuned, comprehensive perspectives begin to emerge.
     Such immediate benefits, however, are only tastes of what is potentially a profound transformative process, for when practiced intensely, meditation disciplines almost invariably lead into the transpersonal realm of experience. Advanced practitioners report states of consciousness, levels of perceptual sensitivity and clarity, and degrees of insight, calm, joy, and love that far exceed those experienced by most people in their daily life. A progressive sequence of altered states of consciousness can occur, which may ultimately result in the permanent, radical shift in consciousness known as enlightenment or liberation.”

       Roger Walsh. “Meditation: Doorway to the Transpersonal.” In R. Walsh, F. Vaughan eds. “Beyond Ego: Transpersonal Dimensions in Psychology.” JP Tarcher, 1980.

    For more depth & detail: http://www.johnlovas.com/2020/02/maturing-beyond-ordinary-happiness.html

#736 Words, Concepts, Definitions ... Limits of Language

     When we directly engage with reality, there is wonder, gratitude, silence, stillness, timelessness, peace, and joy. We all know & love this as an aspect of consciousness, yet don't experience it nearly often enough. And when we do experience it, we may inadvertently start talking to ourselves or to others to describe it, to "capture it" in words - which immediately ends the transcendent experience. Words can indeed get in the way!
     Though we crank out far too many words (rather than listening attentively), we do sometimes need to say something. Here's an interesting discussion about the great difficulty of capturing complex, important concepts (such as wisdom) using words, word-based concepts & definitions:

     "Philosophers have debated definitional issues for centuries, and even today lament that, in the words of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 'The problems of definition are constantly recurring ... no problems of knowledge are less settled than those of definition ...' In fact the French philosopher Jacques Derrida argued that 'nearly every term is an aporia' (an irreducible puzzle) that 'admits of no settled solution or clear resolution.'
     Eastern philosophies agree. One of the central themes of Buddhist Madhyamika philosophy is that all phenomena are shunyata: a difficult term to translate, but implying that all phenomena are inherently transconceptual. Likewise Radhakrishnan, one of India’s greatest philosophers and also its second president, pointed to 'the inadequacy of all intellectual categories ...” Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, put it poetically:

          Existence is beyond the power of words to define:
          Terms may be used but none of them are absolute.

     So defining wisdom, or anything else for that matter, turns out to be a deep linguistic challenge. We cannot expect absolute certainty or agreement from our terms nor from our definitions. However, we can try to use them carefully and skillfully, remembering that, as the philosopher Huston Smith put it, 'all human thought proceeds from words. As long as words are askew, thought cannot be straight.' "
       Roger Walsh. "What is Wisdom? Cross-cultural and Cross-disciplinary Synthesis." Review of General Psychology 19(3); 278-293: 2015.

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