on silence and meditation

to prep for my first real zen med course tonight with my papa who wanted to learn too (after reading and trying out a few med styles, i think i feel most comfortable with the zen school, but this is a really preliminary assessment!), and also for june

"Why should silence be an end in itself? Asian meditative traditions emphasize the elimination of the self, but to what end? Your quick sweep aside of western silent traditions seems overly hasty to me, but then I'm a Quaker so of course I would think that. It is easy for us moderns to dismiss prayer as irrational giving over to a powerful other, but it is also acknowledgment of an inability to "do it all" ourselves. Quaker tradition emphasizes "expectant waiting," where the silence is to remove distraction from what we need to be hearing, the presence and word of God (or the equivalent for those of us who are not theists, myself among them). This is different from what to Westerners can seem nihilistic in Eastern practice, and yet it is also performed in silence.

Silence does not have to be absolute to be valuable. I myself do not crave perfect silence, I crave quiet. As an antidote to the off-balance, out-of-control, too-fast, too-loud matter of everyday life, I find it necessary."

response:

"Actually, no Asian tradition emphasises the "elimination" of the "self", but rather that our habitual egocentric notions of the self are illusory. The Buddhist schools maintain that careful investigation, through meditation and logic, shows that no such "self" can be found, while the non-dualist Hindu schools (particularly Advaita Vedanta) maintain that there is only one all-encompassing Self, which is another term for the pure unlimited awareness in which the so-called phenomenal world arises. Despite the apparent divergence here, I would cautiously suggest that Zen, Tibetan Buddhism (particularly the Mahamudra and Dzogchen practices), and Vedanta are ultimately quite similar, and that the classic debates between Buddhists and Hindus in India had more to do with the limits of language in considering what a "self" might be.

This is a vast and deep subject, but I would also cautiously suggest that the reason this kind of thinking seems alien and sometimes nihilistic to Westerners (and Buddhist thinkers such as Nagarjuna were explicit in pointing out the dangers of such nihilism) is for the following reasons: 1) Judaism and Christianity posit a relationship between a transcendant Creator and incarnated soul that is thought to be in some sense autonomous, and free to intuit and accept the apparent agenda of that Creator or not; 2) Judaism and Christianity conceive of time as linear, and add the notion of destiny to it, meaning that history is progressive and moving toward some kind of goal or purpose; and 3) Western philosophical and scientific thought is subject/object-based, and thus dualistic (mind/body, self/other, observer/observed, this/that, Creator/creation, etc.). All of this is absent from most Asian thinking (even if some dualistic Hindu schools seem closer to the Judeo-Christian point of view.) Moreover, a Westnerner who knows nothing about philosophy or religion will think this way in any case, i.e., that they Really Are, so to speak, a free autonomous individual or subject who deals with an external world "out there" (Heidegger is very informative on this subject too). Asian traditions do not deny that reality appears dualistic -- but they teach how we can see through dualism and apprehend the profound unity that underlies it. Westerners get nervous when their notions of privileged subjectivity and "there is somehow a point to all this" are undermined, whereas Dharma practitioners find this liberating, not at all nihilistic. What "point" does there need to be to appreciate the miracle of here and now? Perhaps this is what Tim Parks discovered -- that there is something more to us than our obsessive stories about what we think we are, than all the justifications we throw out for ourselves and the world, than all the chatter that arises in our minds -- a chatter that ultimately leads to neurosis; a chatter that is getting worse with all the "information" now infecting our culture. Perhaps he found, beneath that din, that he was perfect as he is, and felt the fresh wind of Clarity."

interesting that i read abit about the different conceptions of time between diff cultures in what i thought was a mega useless mod i am taking called intercultural communications. its fascinating how this conception (and of course many others) bleeds into our individual cultures' take on values and religion - which really makes me agree that alot of things are actually subjective even if they may be posited as "Truths", inevitably edited by our own conditioning. abit on that time bit here:

"Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?

Chen designed a study...to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.

While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.)"