(296) The finest of lines between the attempt and the achieve

On August 9th 2023 I was attempting meditation on our terrace. My wife came home and, unbeknownst to me, posted about it on Facebook -

  • Fiona Pitt-kethley

    Got back to find Beast meditating on the roof. There is a fine line between that and doing nothing. Well, maybe there is no line at all. Plus you do not catch any fish.
    I then walked in and she asked me upon what specifically I had been meditating. That generated a coincidence which I was then moved to add to the nascent thread she already had stemming from her Facebook post  -

    I came in a few minutes ago, unaware of my wife´s post, and she asked what I had been meditating upon. I said I felt it almost encumbent upon me to now meditate for thereby I might perhaps precipitate some form of higher consciousness. 
    In my life I had known about fifty brief experiences of a sensitivity and compassion (each when asleep) which I can only describe as ´Divine´. The last of these had occurred only some ten weeks ago and I had told her about it noting that, whilst not constituting any classical form of "enlightenment", such experience did at least show there to be a ´Divine component' to reality to make life´s journey more pleasant. And I said I felt meditating just might have something to do with an increased number of coincidences in my life. 
    But, I conceded, it was all speculative and mentioned a line which I thought had been devised by the laconic US comic, Steve Wright: 
    "There´s a fine line between fishing and just standing there with a pole in your hand." (He delivers it here at 2:32 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiGag5emLJg ) 
    ONLY THEN did she tell me about how she had just made such a comment here about my meditating.


    Fiona then added to her earlier post with -
    Fiona Pitt-kethley
    Dave Stuttard I was going off at a tangent here as there are sayings about there being a fine line between fishing and doing nothing. I changed this to meditation and doing nothing. I am not a fan of meditation

    Simon Wood then contributed this in response to my above contribution -

    Simon Wood

    Extraordinary coincidence about the line (pole) and fish.
    Do you have a technique you can pass on? I would like some higher consciousness at the mo.
    In fact I wanna manifest, especially cash.

    So I had to comment upon how inner subjective experience, (tragically, O how tragically!) since you cannot prove it, carries little if any value as ´ammunition´ with which to change anybody´s mind about a spiritual reality. 
    BUT I contrasted that with coincidence which just might perhaps constitute a form of legitimate "ammo" when it was supported by strong or, better still, complete documentary evidence -

    H. James Plaskett
    Ahhhhh... my friend. That was also something I touched upon when replying to her about why I had meditated. 
    For I mentioned a friend, a contemporary, who is profoundly interested in philosophical and metaphysical questions and yet told me, only a few weeks back, that he has never yet had an experience of higher consciousness. Hence my reluctance - please forgive me - to operate as any form of spiritual teacher nor guru. For, as was surely conveyed by that Steve Wright quip, I do not bloody well know what is behind these things! And the generation of the attendant coincidence involving what I said and what Fiona had already posted here is, of course, another thing over which I may exercise no kind of conscious control.
    BUT I can RECORD the coincidences when THOSE occur...
    The subjective experiences of the ´Divine´... well, those I cannot, how to say,... capture. And for me that is a source of ineffable regret and sorrow.��

    I had also found myself over the years becoming less than 100% sold re the efficacy of "spiritual exercises". I mean; how come my friend got zilch? 
    I recalled reading a book which my wife once cited as her Book of the Year for The Observer: A Fortune Teller Told Me by Tiziano Terzani. Tiziano Terzani - Wikipedia
    For many years he was Der Spiegel´s Far Eastern correspondent and was told by a fortune teller not to fly in 1993. So that year he used other forms of transport. During his travels he bumped into a fellow Italian whom he had thought might be in India but they met when Terzani visited a Zen monastery in Thailand. The man had taken the name ´Chang Chaub´ and dedicated himself 24/7 for some twenty years to the pursuit of the form of enlightenment known as ´Satori´. Satori - Wikipedia
    So he would rise at 3: A.M. to observe 'koans' i.e. disciplines such as the mental recital of questions like

    "You have heard the sound of two hands clapping. What is the sound of one hand clapping?"

    The supposed intent is to illustrate the limitations of rationality and thereby throw the mind "out of focus".
    I hate analogies, but I suppose the closest I can find is the "Magic Eye" images which were quite popular circa 1990 and demanded they be viewed from a slightly unusual perspective before the hidden image became manifest.

    But when Terzani asked Chang Chaub whether he´d achieved satori yet, he admitted he had not. And contrasted his failure with a chap he knew who had got it after less than two years of such exercises whilst driving down a freeway in California.
    That, combined with admissions from others who had assiduously performed exercises over long periods of time but had also to relate those had not led to the spiritual experiences they sought, led me to wonder what exactly could be going on. 

    Efforts to acquire qualifications normally succeed. Attributes such as, e.g. health, intelligence, youth help but, one imagines, provided she has those in reasonable supply, applying herself to becoming a doctor, lawyer, accountant, architect, veterinary surgeon, chemical engineer, grandmaster, etc will get her there.

    And I had reached the top 100 in the world in my chosen field.
    What then were the invisible ´X Factors´ causing the problems?

    Where lay the aspirants' deficiencies? 
    Why did the driver on the Californian freeway get satori after nothing like the total committal of Chang Chaub and only 1/11th of the time?
    Such contrasting reports of results from people who had striven for the same spiritual experiences seemed to me to be demonstrating an axiom of The American Constitution (a truth held "to be self-evident")
    to be bogus.
  • For here we are most clearly able to discern that
  • ´NOT All men are created equal´


  • .

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