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Joy, Blissfulness, Silence
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands Veteran
in Meditation
I have found these things a mark of the authentic religious experience — joy, blissfulness and silence. If they come to visit you on a still summer night in the gardens, the universe is sheltering you, come unexpectedly bearing gifts to lay at your feet.
It is being open to it, being available to the celebration of the cosmos. Being ready to dance with it.
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Comments
Hmmm, perhaps there are more raucous expressions of anyone's "authentic" religious experiences that, while not limited to today's love & light tendencies, could also be equally valid marks worthy of a dance partner.
Some of the journeys behind shifting from selfishness to selflessness can bear witness to more active & dynamic expressions, that are not limited to just what joy, blissfulness & silence, offers.
^^^^ AMEN to that!
Then what makes you consider your “more raucous” expressions as authentically religious, @how? How would you describe the feeling?
Your opening comment spoke of the authentic religious experience. In my response, I put the word authentic in quotation marks because I am uncomfortable judging other people's religious experiences as being authentic or unauthentic.
It is not uncommon for meditation practitioners to be unaware that religious experiences can be detrimental to the participant if they are cultivated before the practitioner is capable of digesting the full Dharma of that experience. A typical example of this is where the practitioner ends up stunting that arising experience through mistakenly grasping after it or identifying it as something to possess. When the inevitable suffering arises from our grasping after it, confusion, doubt and an eventual rejection of one's path can be the result. This is one of the reasons why most schools shy away from making a big deal about them.
So rather than assigning a religious experience as authentic or not, I'd prefer to address it as to whether or not it leads one from selfishness to selflessness.
Some of the wisest teachers I know have arrived where they are without yet having a religious experience. Conversely, history freely speaks of some of the most destructive people you can imagine who seem to have been influenced by a plethora of religious experiences.
While joy, blissfulness & silence often mark the visitation of a religious experience, they can also be accompanied by joy's transcendence or the very unquiet & raucous vibrancy of the universe's chaos. Having a complaisant certainty within one's quietistic slumbering through life, get abruptly overturned with an awakening from that dream.
Both examples can be equally authentic while not needing to be confined or qualified to the traits of the other.
I don't think that anyone gets through life without some religious experiences arising. Often they are only met with obliviousness or an obsession over them.
What a Buddhist practice should establish is a baseline practice on how to treat them just like any other visiting phenomenon. Allow them an unmolested journey in the arising, living, and departures of their visits, without grasping after, ignoring, or rejecting these
guests.
I was trying to share something, rather than trying to put something up for discussion
Though you are undoubtedly right in saying there is more than one, what I was trying to point to is something specific, the atmosphere of ten thousand seekers after truth sitting in silence and all come to hear one man speak.
If I may…. @Jeroen … this is a discussion board. Hence, the title. Not really a blog/journal spot. I think it’s fair at this point of your time spent here, for you to expect conversations/feedback/things people have to say, etc.
I would even offer that the internet as a whole, is not the ideal place to share things without expectation of feedback.
Then that is the place where the internet falls down, as a place of genuine sharing. You are welcome to discuss about my sharings, there is nothing wrong in it, but you may end up following the workings of the mind and miss the finger pointing to the moon…
I would think of the sensation in question as a genuine ( in preference to authentic, which seems to suggest a value judgement via some orthodox viewpoint ) spiritual experience, one that becomes a religious experience when conceptualized according to some particular religious system of thought. For example, I once - in my theistic/deistic phase - thought of it as God speaking to me. Now I think of it more as seeing directly into Sunyatta - dharmas here are empty, all are the primal void, etc - but it is what it is, a pearl of great price, the jewel in the heart of the lotus.
Just noodling, as @genkaku used to say.
Awwww…. genkaku…
🙏🏻
^^^^ AMEN to that!
So many posts on the internet are judged with the factual, blaming mind, as if finding the least fault is more important than whatever larger truths are being pointed to. It’s sad.
Well, all I know is that when you don't identify with anything that appears and disappears in awareness, the result is deep peace and contentment. It's all cool.
That is good enough for now. No amount of talking is going to change that.
Hmm
A smile says it all without words...
A smile can mean many things…