July 30, 2015: Bake Off: Representations, Illusions, and Philosophical Wanderings.

     This meeting was one of our free-for-all Bake Offs.
     We began by wondering a little bit about meditation and contemplation, and the idea of focusing on an object to train our concentration.
     A member offered that, for example, that blue coffee cup there on the table is a representation. But also there is a mindfulness of the cup, an experience in the present moment of the cup. There is a gap between seeing the cup and being mindful of it, and then knowing, associating with it as the blue cup for drinking coffee,etc. The cup is basically all of our individual associations.
     Meridith offered some ideas on representation: this word means a function of how our sensory organs work. The goal of meditating to reach a base awareness doesn't mean not perceiving the object. Indeed, representation is the mass of huge concepts we place between us and the object. We fill our mind with labels. In most spiritual traditions, it is the labels that we try to drop.
     There is another way to concentrate on an object; that is a concept that Thich Nhat Hanh calls Interbeing. If we think about a piece of paper. The existence of that paper consists and is dependent on a whole series of things and events. It is the wood, the tree, the people who grow the tree, those who cut the tree, those who work in the paper factory, and on and on. Take away one of those things and we would not have the piece of paper. The piece of paper is actually all of that. From here we get into in permanence. Everything has a limited existence in time and space. We should actually look at objects as verbs rather than nouns. They are becoming, being, disappearing when we thing of the object.
     Someone wrote: "Our personal consciousness is not capable of representing more than a small portion of all this. Our senses cannot even detect many energy forms....Consciousness is dependent on language, and also on needs and desires. As the 13th century Persian Sufi Poet Rumi wrote: "What a piece of break looks like depends on whether you are hungry or not."
     Paul commented that whether we get at the idea of reaching enlightenment or any form of peace by spiritual means or by using a materialistic physical view of the cosmos, we may be comforted and indeed liberated by the idea that we may never know the right way. We feel comforted by having it be OK not to know, or even not to try hard to know.
    Todd Davison, our former leader, said it again and again, "We can choose peace." Originally he was very Freudian on his view of the ego. But after he wrote his book, Trust the Force", his concept of the ego was tempered. It had moderated. We all know about the fight or flight response, but in the end we can choose this or we can choose peace.
     Gary said, who has written so much about this, said, "What makes me who I am is my view of the blue cup (that we talked about earlier), my experience of the blue cup. That experience is what is real. The cup is an illusion, but the experience is real. Another way to look at it: rather than the drop of water being absorbed by the ocean; the drop of water takes on the ocean." This is comforting. My existence like the drop of water is important and can take on the whole of the universe. Representations of a red rubber ball are not real. Our experience is of a red rubber ball. Our nervous system is limited and can not express everything there is about the red rubber ball.