Contemplative Spirituality & AS

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I am interested in Buddhism. I used to meditate in the morning and evenings.. I found that as an aspie I was a natural meditator! I used to zone out all the time in the classroom at school.

I found meditation very interesting, I had some unexpected unusual experiences with it... sometimes I would float off, or lapse into dreams and visions, or wake up feeling completely happy and balanced...

I need to start doing it again.

thanks, zenmistress, for your perspective. I agree that Asperger's is a blessing in many ways, especially those you mentipmed. I have lots of time. I will stay quiet and see what happens.

Right now, I am part of a small group (my only social activity outside of family) that practices Centering Prayer and Taize Prayer. I find the silence refreshing, but not yet revelatory.
I am also currently into reading the Sufi mystics and the novels of James D. Doss (I've already read everything by Hillerman that has come out in paperback). There is just enough discription of Ute spirituality in these murder mysteries to help me get into a contemplative state. Same thing was true for Hillerman and Navaho spirituality.
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If in thirst you drink water from a cup, you see God in it. Those who are not in love with God will see only their own faces in it. Rumi (Sufi)

What I personally use is a combination of prayer with silent or spoken dhikr or simran (mantra meditation). After I am in a state of spiritual receptivity, I reflect on various subjects.

Thanks, Odin, but I found Chopra's book valuable when I needed it. Thats all I know or really need to know. No doubt you are right. Quantum mechanics is probably beyond most non-physicists and the spiritual metaphor is always a stretch at best. But the "place" beyond the event horizon is still a mystery and is likely to remain so during my lifetime. "God" is one of the less improbable hypotheses about whats out there.

Please keep this thread going. My soul needs it

Odin: I promise never to mention Chopra again

What would agnostic spirituality look like? Would it simply be the adoration of nature (human and otherwise) or would it go beyond that? Would admitting agnostics (and atheists) into the community of mystics harm or benefit spirituality. Was Hitler a mystic? If so why? If not, why not?

Odin: "New Age" is not a term that is off=putting to me. I don't have any interest in crystals or esp or reincarnation, but evidently I share many new age ideas. I took a test somewhere to try to discover which religion was closest to my worldview. I came out 1)liberal Quaker, 2) Mahayana Buddhists 3) Taoist, 4)neoPagan, 5)new age. All others were way down the list. Since, to me, Taoists, pagans (aboriginal animists), and Buddhists are the contemplators extraordinaire, and Quakers are among the most contemplative of Christians, maybe there is a relationship between "new age" and contemplation also. If so, I'm all for it.

When I became consciously aware of my environment, I became afraid. I'm certain no one intended this result, but it is what happened. I learned about hell and desparately wanted to avoid it. Later I become consciously aware of pleasure. I enjoyed the taste and feel (and sometimes the sound, sight, and smell) of it. I learned of heaven and wanted to go there. Later I learned that there was a difference between "good" and "bad" and that "gppd" was better (even if good sometimes felt worse than bad). I learned about "paths of righteousness" and I wanted to follow the same one my parents and friends did. Later, I learned that the path my parents and friends followed was not only the best path. it was the only acceptable path. I learned that paths not chosen by my relatives and friends were "evil" and that "evil" was not just "bad" it was supernaturally bad. I learned that there was a "law" and people in my culture knew what that "law" was, but people who felt otherwise were mistaken. If my eyes, head or heart told my something different than tradition told me, I was to trust tradition ("scripture") and deny the evidence of my eyes, head or heart. This made me unhappy, so I gave up tradition.

Then I discovered "relativity" Truth depends on perspective. It is not "out there." Eventually "good" seemed inherently no different from "evil" (but pleasure was still better than pain). I dicovered that I was a "phenomenologist," a natural anthropologist, a natural scientist. This made me feel smart, and also happy for a while.

Is there anything wrong with genocide other than the fact that I don"t like it? Thoughts like this made me unhappy again.

Then about thirty years ago, when I was supposedly a "mature" adult, I came to believe that "relativity" was not the end of my spiritual quest but only a brief respite from it.

I came to believe that morality, scripture, and even "religion" were not the culmination of spiritual quests but only the beginning.
I came to believe that while people of different religions argued and fought against one another, people of the mystical traditions within those religions rejoiced in one another and learned from one another.

I discovered the Tao te Ching. Magnificent! Incredible! Then I discovered Zen Buddhism, Then I discovered the Sufi tradition within Islam. Then I encounted the "path of beauty" within the Navaho tradition; then the multitude of other aboriginal spiritual paths. Then I rediscovered the mysticism and contemplative spirituality within my own culture: John of the Cross, Francis of Assisi, and people I had never learned about in 40 plus years of studying religion: Meister Ekhart, the Cloud of Unknowing, Hildegarde of Bingen, etc.

Now, I'm going to just sit for twenty minutes.

Does anyone know any good websites with information on meditation?

The idea of a "generic" mysticism, drawing "water" from some of the many "fountains" like choosing from a cafetaria menu, really appeals to me! I would be particularly drawn to an agnostic mysticism, but I have seen nothing in that area that appeals to me.The 19th century English mystic Richard Jeffries is interesting, but his methods and insights did not particularly appeal to me. (Maybe I'll have to try Huxley again after all these years.) Monotheism (patriarchal, hierarchical, restrictive) really turns me off, but I find the mysticism that grows out of these traditions to be extraordinarily beautiful and spiritually helpful (Cabala, Sifiism,
Orthodox and Roman Catholic mysicism).
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"When the doors of perception are cleansed we shall see things as they are. " Aldous Huxley

Criss: Where are you?

"My time apart is not a time of deep prayer, nor a time in which I experience a special closeness to God, it is not a period of serious attentiveness to the divine mysteries. I wish it were! On the contrary, it is full of distractions, inner restlessness, sleepiness, confusion and boredom. It seldom, if ever, pleases my senses. But the simple fact of being for one hour in the presence of the Lord and of showing him all that I feel, sense, and experience, without trying to hide anything, must please him. Somehow, somewhere, I know that he loves me, even though I do not feel that love as I can feel a human embrace, even though I do not hear a voice as I hear human words of consolation, even though I do not see a smile, as I can see in a human face. Still God speaks to me, looks at me, and embraces me there, where I am still unable to notice it."--Henri Nouwen (quoted in Rolheiser, "The Holy Longing).

Sometimes I must use other nouns than "the Lord" of "God" and other pronouns instead of "he" or "him", but Nouwen speaks to my feeling about contemplation. It is not much, but it will do until much comes along.

Anybody read Eckhart Tolle? Oprah and Deepak like him, but he still might be worth looking at?

I am a deeply spiritual person, and also deeply agnostic. I know that there is nothing that I truly know, and so I am forced to keep an open mind at all times. It seems to me that everything is relative and entirely dependent on perspective. I think that organized religion is the bane of all free thought and expression. The only rules that anyone can expect to impose and uphold are rules upon oneself, and to dictate your objective morality onto someone else is nothing but attempting to set boundaries on his path of discovery.

That said, we are all of the same collective consciousness, and at some level we must have agreed to impose our individual natures upon one another in order to experience all there is to experience. Perhaps the collective is what god is, but it may also be that we compose only another entity which is experiencing things in a community of another larger collective consciousness that is likewise unaware of its agreement with itself to experience all that it can experience. Likewise, we very well may be the consciousness that's experiencing itself in a way that forms a community of smaller pieces that are interacting with each other in such a way that they are similarly unaware of us as we are of our collective. Perhaps when they have an experience we have an idea, or make an inner discovery.

There is so much that I don't know, and I want to learn it all. I know the above was quite a tangent, but it serves the function of conveying how much thinking I need to do at all times. I think my deviant brain functions allow me to explore those thoughts more thoroughly than a neurotypical mind would, as well as allowing me to think them in the first place. My thoughts are beautiful, and any discussion that encourages me to have more of them is welcome.

Thank you for starting this thread.