Hello Nico Cost, nice to hear from you.  I apologize that my reply rhythm might be delayed, but rest assured that I will answer most of your valuable comments, on this thread and the others.  I just delayed one more day here, because I wanted to try the 2nd experiment which I hadn’t been doing.  Things seem to be opening up pretty fast, so what I write now may be short lived.

How do we touch other people’s lives here on this forum?  On other word-press forums, statistics show how many posts and how many views.  Here we know nothing about views, only number of posts and number of voices.  Views are only evident by comments.  Here I made the only comment.  On my thread, Philosophical Underpinnings, you made the only comment.  Are we touching the others? – But one is enough.

We make some statements, either as a proposal, or as “our truth”.  Even my proposals work in my life. Those are our gifts.  Then if the other engages with it, that is how it is received.

BE SURE; I AM RECEIVING YOUR GIFTS.

I followed your advice on the day that I saw it, more than a week ago.  (The first one was enough so I did not even read the throat chakra, but I will do it tonight.  I did.)  I altered the first meditation because I thought it mistaken to have expectations.  So, I omitted the starry sky and the shower of love from the universe.  Now reading the 2nd instructions you do say, “The art in meditating is to expect nothing and not try to direct anything.”  (No visualizations.)

I would now say that all of my life, meditation has had expectations, because spiritual teachers prescribe it as a path toward enlightenment (or awakening, or whatever you want to call it).  Now I see; that my meditations for decades have always been wrecked, by the way in which the teacher presented them.

I have done your process every day, twice a day and sometimes back-to-back, for 3 times in a day.  It is my experiment now.  The latest is that I sit in my favorite chair, and I am already in “stage two”, just by sitting. And I do not use any music.  Music is a timer (8 min), but without it I sit one hour, and then this morning 70 minutes.  I have no urgency to get up.  But that in no way makes me an advanced meditation student.  I would say I am not meditating at all.  I am observing the process of meditation (and “not-preferring thoughts”).  It’s not the same.

WHAT IS MEDITATION THEN?

These are just my definitions out of rationality, not from any ‘spiritual transmission”.  1. many people think contemplation is meditation.  Like every translator of Marcus Aurelius titled his book “Meditations”.  It is not!  It is contemplations. (I like that book, one of my favorites.) But not our subject here.

2.  Many people think visualization is meditation.  You used it, visualizing a starry sky, and the thrilling feeling of that vastness against my smallness.  You suggested to label it as the love of the universe showering down on me.  Yes, maybe that would be a doorway into a great feeling, (but is that meditation or spirituality?)

3.  The only one word in English or any other human language that approaches meditation is “SILENCE”.  It is a NO-THING. It has no qualities.  No concepts, no languages nor communications. (We could claim resonance.)  There is no movement, nor any space/time continuum. So, no location, non-temporal, no light no dark.  Nothing from the material realm about it, no limits from the speed of light.

I propose that Silence IS what some people call “the spiritual realm”.  MEDITATION makes the claim that you can apprehend that.  BUT HOW?

AND WHY?  One way to simplify why, it is to say, why – because it is happening.  I am doing it now.  Maybe that is enough.

How is the instruction: Try to keep your mind as empty as possible. Don’t resist thoughts, but also let them fly by as you focus on your breathing.  But we have to look at the how thoughts can “fly-by”?

WHAT FLOWS THROUGH YOUR MIND? And why is it different than what flows through my mind?  We have to conclude that there is a built-in preference mechanism in each of us, that focuses our individual thoughts.  But we (I) said silence has no qualities.  I am going to propose that we cannot have silence as a preference, because without qualities, there is nothing to visualize, no handles to grab hold of it, and no way to set it up as our priority.  So, the only way to get to silence is to NOT PREFER everything else.

A thought comes up – I don’t prefer that.  A thought comes up – I don’t prefer that.  A thought comes up – I don’t prefer that.  The process is a negation, the skill is how to not to pick-up a thought.  Or since they come pretty fast, how to “set-down” a thought.  It is not a very direct route toward Silence.

Anyhow, without any expectations, it shouldn’t be too upsetting.

I should really stop here.  But I’ll add one supposition. Maybe there could come a point where you can step in and out of silence at will?  Like going through a door.  Is that what happens for you?  For instance.  I claim I can step in and out of emotional reaction at will.  No more difficult than going through an open door.  It is so easy, that I have no fear of letting emotions play; and my life is richer for it, not constrained. Reactions are weightless for me; they have no impact on my being and they don’t automatically create actions, (that I later regret).  (Other people’s repeated reactions can be annoying).

Like I said: I just started with the second offering, so we’ll see if that changes anything?

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I am new here, so what can a baby say about these important issues? Well, I did look around a bit. I reached the very first post on Feb 6 2023, where it was said: “welcome to poets, ranters, drive-by posters, musicians, bible-thumpers, Larch, historians, astrologers, madmen, recipe makers, and whoever escaped me.” (SO I AM IN THAT GROUP!)

Basic rationality does not require a PhD specialty, nor tons of research and facts. If you look at a big enough picture to see most of the assumptions, the trajectory becomes more than evident. That does not mean you can reverse it, or know some solution. Generally, a wider context shows more options, but they still need to be implemented and tested.

Simple Rationality is a good way to address things, because nobody is left out for the lack of expertise. Everybody can follow the simple trajectories. Other discussion techniques are to add more complexity, more details, and more expertise. Very tiring, and they don’t get anywhere either. They just try to shut you up, with their steam roller technique. (Yeah, there can be details.)

We spend our time on what we define as giving the most payback. Many thousands of people look at current events, each from their own viewpoint.

Much of this site seems to be an aggregator of events, maybe looking behind the standard narratives. There are all kinds of angles behind there. I don’t think we aggregate many first person accounts. If we did, we wouldn’t believe them, as too invested in their own perspective. So we are aggregators of the aggregators, or those who claim expertise. Yes they too have a viewpoint. A lot of it we deem ugly. What we realize is that life is only a commodity, and that wholesale killing is one way to distribute and use-up that commodity. Many heartily reject that observation, but it is in-our-face, nevertheless.

Depending on your intensity, you may be making a chronicle of atrocities. That stems from a belief in a payback from these chronicles. WHAT IS THAT PAYBACK? OK, now I know about some of these unacceptable, and on up to atrocities. What am I going to do about it? What is your payback from telling me?

Yes, I believe in being informed, but if I already know it 10 times, need I know it 100 times?

WHAT IS IN YOUR FACE; IS THE HIDDEN PERSCRIPTION OF CIVILIZATION, AS WE KNOW IT. But now it has slipped out, and is no longer hidden. I have called it the Euro-Centric view.  Yet many in denial avert their gaze from the obvious. What proxy wars tell us is not about the combatants, who accepted the money. It is about the sponsors, who are responsible for, and justify every atrocity. What do the populations of these sponsors have to say about it. Very subdued if audible at all. No peace movements. Of course, here we are on globalsouth.co. What is our payback, and is there another way?

Am I allowed to discuss this without having any alternative?

One angle is to purify our language. If 99 Jewish people are up to some scheme and one Jewish person is not involved, it is not THE JEWS who are doing this. Collective nouns skip over the possible solutions, whether it is “the Muslims”, or “the Christians” or “the Jews”, (or everybody else).

Why do we give notoriety to 100 rabid jackals, but not even to ONE rational voice? For instance, Shlomo Sand is an Israeli emeritus professor of history at the Tel Aviv University, I think for 40 years. His books all deny the Zionist narrative. I think he is still active, and teaching. Who are his Israeli students? Why don’t we give voice to alternative views like his? Couldn’t changes be energized from the inside?

Here is one of his most popular books:

https://brax.me/f/Shlomo-Sand-The-Invention-of-the-Jewish-People-2009.pdf/T4AZ6660205b337709.01566531

thanks.