vague sketch of progression, with respect to emptiness and groundlessness:
A thread that's kind of trying to articulate the long run, far reaches of meditation (and, inseparably, a life interleaved with meditation, and other transformative practice, & just living, hurting, enjoying, life itself), & why anyone might care to explore those far reaches.
Say there's "feeling," "form" & "function."
Feeling is how things are, subjectively/aconceptually/preconceptually, experienced "from the inside."
Form is the (felt) "conceptual structure" of thought & action.
And function is "action/motor output," actual human doing/happening.
Feeling is sort of prior to form and function, sort of the ground of those latter two. Form and function can sort of only be known as feeling, or, their being known is not-other-than feeling. Yet form "structures" in feeling." And function is structurally conditioned on form.
If feeling and form change, function must change. Yet very similar function(s) can have extremely different feeling/form. If feeling changes, form must change, yet very similar form(s) can have extremely different feeling.
So, you can have menches and sociopaths, and everyone in between, with lots of nearly the same "function"--walking, talking, eating, sleeping. They might all hammer in a nail in kind of the same way, but the inner "feeling" is extremely different.
And, of course so is function! Menches and sociopaths, will diverge in behavior in subtle and overt ways, which is why those labels juxtapose. But, the point is sort of that function is heavily constrained by environment/homeostasis/etc.
And feeling and form much, much less so.
(Though, the long-run "mutual perfection" (not to inappropriately reify "perfection") of feeling, form, and function ultimately mutually, positively constrain each other.)
(Saints and Psychopaths is a title of a book, by the way, cf. my riff of menches and sociopaths)
Here is a more concrete example of all this: (next tweet)
Water feels "wet," to a baby, a teenager, a plumber, a physicist, an installation artist.
But, that wetness is different for each of them.
Say, for the physicist, the form of hydrogen bonds, quarks, etc., inhere in the immediate feeling of wetness, its very being & seeming.
And, function inheres especially differently in wetness, for the baby, the plumber, the installation artist. They each have different affordances, different possibilities.
So, wetness, in embodied totally, and even in "raw sensation" feels differently, to each & any of them.
Meditation progress kind of goes (very, very roughly) in the order of:
- weird sensory stuff
- intense psychological stuff
- metaphysical weirdness (emptiness, luminosity, impermanence/non-eternity, non-specialness/ordinariness/naturalness, etc.)
- compassion, love, friendliness, wisdom, inner peace, wellbeing, effortlessness (by degrees)
- continued changes in feeling, form, and function
And, this latter one is the most interesting to me.
Over years and decades, the very X of the world continues to change, where X =
appearing, seeming, being, knowing, feeling...
self, other, world; body, mind, environment...
life, death, goals, history, meaning, morality...
This radical and ongoing "refoundationing" of feeling, form, and function is what continues to interest me about meditation.
Anyway, I'll kind of peter out, here. These quotes seem relevant:
"The real voyage of discovery consists, not in
seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
— Proust
“Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end.”
— John Lennon
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See also maybe: https://metarationality.com/bongard-meta-rationality
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Emptiness very withstanding, it’s very hippocampal--more and more, less fragmentedly, more unfragmentedly, you know who you are (which one; this one; not that one or those ones), what you are (previously mistaken), where/when you are, with respect to the state of the world, the distant past, the far future. Again, this can only wholly happen, in emptiness, under nonduality/luminosity/etc., all of that affords settling, affords seeing (body)mind for what it actually is, and in that, or of that, or under that, all of that can reshape itself so as to “know where you are,” yet still, “not two, not one,” empty, nebulous, provisional, light, and so on.