Truth times Nine

Samadhis, Savikalpa with Nirvikalpa. Savikalpa is Awareness through the senses (sensory perception) minus the "I" / "Other" duality, whereas Nirvikalpa is Awareness pure and simple.


It has been my experience that this is a continuum.

It appears that I have a much more broad categorization of what thinking is than you seem to. While I certainly don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth, it seems to me that perhaps one’s understanding of what a thought is has mainly to do with what I would call the internal dialog.

I do not limit my categorization of what thinking is to just that mental phenomenon. This is because I found that after I discontinued the internal dialog, and went further and discontinued holding onto attitudes, I realized not just no-mind and no-self, but also the emptiness of the environment in which I dwelt (as well as the emptiness within this body). For instance, I would hear the emptiness in the space around this body, and sounds coming from other objects echoing through this emptiness and enlivened in these ears.

But I also found that one could go further. I found that there are thoughts even more subtle than those previously mentioned ones, thoughts “of the world” you might say. To be fair, some might call these kinds of thoughts beliefs. And I need to qualify here that I am not referring to either philosophies, or those intellectual affiliations that some would call their beliefs.

Instead, these were much more general: like a thought, or belief, that there is a world, that there is this which we relate to as life. These were not thoughts that were verbal; they were very hard to pin down as being in a location. But, I sat one evening and began to discontinue holding these thoughts as well. -- Talk about the space between thoughts -- The whole world “disappeared” with the emptiness that then I had only begun to realize and explore.

I guess one could refer to This (emptiness) as awareness, but that amounts to saying that the ocean is wet. It conveys very little of the great dimension of wisdom, light, effervescent knowing, and greatly profound respect and love for all, whether they realize “this which is” or not.

(By the way, these “subtle” thoughts that I am referring to here are not what were writing about earlier. I agree that I would not use the term “subtle thoughts” to describe that phenomenon which some prefer to call “knowing”, and I have termed “transcendental thinking.”)