:: meanders ::

:: A Horoscope for Sagittarius Meditators
You are forever hunting the truth that you already have burning like an oil lamp in the temple inside. To drop hunting is your work. Being a fire sign you have to exhaust yourself like a cattle dog, before such ideas move from the theoretic to the real. See the joke - and keep jumping.

"Seeking for something outside is entering into a house which is on fire. However much you try... You may even become comfortable in an uncomfortable situation, just by saying to yourself, 'This is what life is'. But this is not so. You may settle with your sadness, your misery -- everybody has settled with things believing that, what else can one do? Anger comes, love comes, hate comes, and they all possess you like demons. The only way to avoid this vicious circle -- from one prison to another prison, from one fire to another fire -- the only way is to seek nothing outside and turn inwards. There is no seeking inwards, you simply find. Outside you seek and you never find anything; inside you do not seek, it is already there." --
Osho, Zen: The Language of Existence

The outer world is a fire, a chaos, seething with vibrations. Our five senses are tuned to interpret the world immediately around us. We extend our senes through devices like TV, radio, internet, and print, immersing ourselves in that chaos, bringing into our consciousness. Fortunately, we can turn off the devices. But at the subtle level, all that we take in consciously or not, operates on our body on some level. Some of it digested and used to fuel our knowledge, and through right-action, our wisdom. Some passes right through as chaff. And some lodges within, becoming the stones blocking and clogging our way. For after all, we too are the world, of the world. Is there a difference between the inner and outer? What about the idea that all matter breaks down into the same basic particles? Is there a contradiction here? The science of reason cannot measure that binding force that for conveinence is called spirit, soul, sentience. Only within is that sentience experienced. All the rest is filtered through ouR senses, judged and weighed by our perception, and ultimately stored as a 1 or 0 -- pleasure or pain-- within the matter of our body. And the vicious cycle repeats itself in colorful variations at times but most often in a monotonous repetitiveness we only perceive as "different". Vipassana-- witnessing meditation-- brings one eye to eye with this chain of stimulus-perception/reaction-action/inaction. Being equanamous, that is, witnessing without judgement of what we find, without seeking to find a reason (ie, we lack self-esteem, we were beat up as a kid, we are greedy, we are fill in your issue, blah blah blah), the stillness beyond the chaos is experienced. We can then tap into this stillness when in the outer world, where we must necessarily carry on.
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