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| Synthesis of Meditation and Philosophical Context | ||
| As time goes by, I find myself becoming more interested in the context in which I practice my meditation. By 'context' I mean my personal and social reasons for practicing it, and placing those reasons themselves in an overall view of myself living in this universe - in short, a philosophical context.
As I have said elsewhere on this site, trying to answer the question 'Why do I meditate?' is almost a meditation in itself, a koan if you like. I have found that I have arrived at several answers, and after a time I see that each answer is itself a question, which suggests a further answer, thereby widening the scope of my inquiry. 'Synthesis' is perhaps too final a word, suggesting a completed result. My meditation and philosophical-context form, and inform, each other as an ongoing process. These essays in themselves are evidence of that process. The other essays in this 'Meditation' part of the website were all written in the years 2002 to 2004, when I was struggling to come to terms with my thirty years with Maharaji as my guru, and trying to understand what (if anything) was left of my meditation practice after stepping out from his shadow. By 2006 (the year of the first essay below) that struggle has been resolved, and in these more recent essays I feel able to discover, and express my discoveries, as free from the past as one ever is. | ||
| Meditation and Self | ||
| The title of this essay describes its content. It sets out my stall, as it were, and sets the scene for the following essays. It also has an unorthodox interpretation of the Buddhist Four Noble Truths. | ||
| Living Skillfully | ||
| 'Living Skillfully' is a Buddhist phrase from which I have tried to wring out all the Buddhist flavor. I orginally wrote this essay on Sep 30 2005, just before I went to New York to meet Gene Gendlin of Focusing fame. It was in effect my introduction to him, trying to put on paper where I was at that time, and from where I was coming. | ||
| Viewing The Viewpoints | ||
| Ingredients for this essay include: Nagel's View from Nowhere, Douglas Harding's Headlessness, a touch of Focusing, and a pinch of Mathematics. | ||
| A Metaphysics Of Distinction, Performance And Practice | ||
| This paper won me the Fellowship of the International Society For Philosophers (you can download a PDF version from their site). It is a longer, more academic and philosophically tighter essay than the three above, but is based on them. | ||
| Thinking from Heaven and Earth | ||
| I wrote this in January 2007, after I had read Laura Weed's The Structure of Thinking . | ||
| Jaynes’s Notion of Consciousness as Self-Referential | ||
| This is a somewhat technical (though not too technical) essay on the self-referential nature of consciousness as defined by Julian Jaynes. Jaynes was a psychologist (and to my mind a philosopher as well), whose work was well ahead of his time. This essay was published in the Winter 2007 issue of the The Jaynesian (PDF version), the newsletter of the Julian Jaynes Society. | ||
| Meditation: A personal view using the language of Gene Gendlin | ||
| Gene Gendlin is a philosopher who deserves to be better known. His philosophy of the implicit provides a framework for thinking about, and from, bodily meaning and human living. He has derived Focusing and Thinking at the Edge from this philosophy. I wrote this essay after a meeting with Gene in April 2008 at which we discussed my interest in meditation. | ||
| Touching the Body with the Breath | ||
| This essay continues my project to explain and make precise my own meditation - both what it is, and why I do it. The language I use is again inspired by the philosophy of Gene Gendlin. However, if you don't know what that is, there are only one or two paragraphs in this essay (towards the beginning) that you will find difficult, or incomprehensible even, and which you can just gloss over. If you are interested in Gene's philosophy, he has recently written two papers which summarize much of it: Implicit Functioning (as a Word 2003 doc, or as a PDF) and First and Third Person Processes (in press, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2009). | ||
| Copyright © 2001 - 2009 Michael R Finch | ||
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