Mind Games: Week 1 Influencing the Reptile Mind - Day 7 Trappism

Task: Don't talk to anyone.

It sounds easy enough not to talk, but try it and see.

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Yes I shall, after I've had breakfast. :-)

Meanwhile this exercise reminds me of that Great Silence, an epiphany I encountered around September 1969, 12 years after I got hooked on Zen Buddhism when I chanced upon a book in the air-conditioned school library, a Malayan first in 1957. I was just 12 at the time.

One of the earliest terms I came across that described the experience was 'Cosmic Consciousness' coined by Maurice Bucke.

More evocative perhaps is the Tibetan Buddhist (Vajrayana) Ground Luminosity.

Then there's the Chinese classic: The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao / The name that can be named is not the eternal name...

NTM the many Christian sources.

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Richard Maurice Bucke

Richard Maurice Bucke (18 March 1837 – 19 February 1902), often called Maurice Bucke, was an important Canadian progressive psychiatrist in the late nineteenth century. 

An adventurer in his youth, he went on to study medicine, practice psychiatry in Ontario, and befriend a number of noted men of letters in Canada, the U.S., and England.

In addition to writing and delivering professional papers, Bucke wrote three book-length studies: Man's Moral Nature, Walt Whitman, and – his best known work – Cosmic Consciousness, a classic in the modern study of mystical experience.

Richard Maurice Bucke (Wikipedia)

Here's a link to apparently all 36 chapters from the book, which is still in print:

Cosmic Consciousness by Richard Maurice Bucke

This is an attempted scientific study of illuminated individuals. Bucke provides three dozen very consistent examples of 'cosmic consciousness.' Some of these are the usual suspects, ajavascript:void(0)nd others are contemporary case-histories which Bucke collected. Bucke proposed that these enlightened figures are evolutionary jumps, the predecessor of a more advanced species.

Tao Ching

Tao Classic - Chapters 1 to 37

Ground luminosity (Wyl. gzhi'i 'od gsal) —



Sogyal Rinpoche writes:

In Dzogchen the fundamental, inherent nature of everything is called the "Ground Luminosity" or the "Mother Luminosity." This pervades our whole experience, and is therefore the inherent nature of the thoughts and emotions that arise in our minds as well, although we do not recognize it...

What happens at the moment of death, for everyone, is this: The Ground Luminosity dawns in vast splendor, and with it brings an opportunity for total liberation—if, and only if, you have learned how to recognize it.