I've been thinking about ways to add to this discussion, and I find it's quite hard to come up with something that satisfies.
I consider myself a synthesizer, in short that means I have my own personal far-reaching models that subsumes, systemizes and distills a lot of information. I'm sure some of that stuff would be appreciated, but in my thinking about this discussion something specific happened and I think that possibly that is more helpful. Admittedly, it is seen as more helpful from my current perspective, and I can easily see that to benefit from it, one would have to have already "gotten it".
So, my brain is churning along on some discursive stretch of thought - abstracting and searching the banks for something that I believe you would deem a satisfactory addition to the discussion. And then I remember. Not through a reconstructed memory, but through a present-moment recognition (ie. something happens, real-time, and as it happens it is recognized as having happened before). "Discursive thoughts are discursive thoughts" - it is circular. You
will not find the answer
in thoughts like this, but you might find it
as thoughts like this.
What the hell does that mean?
Can you trace back your asking and questioning? Not in a fancy, metafantastical sense, but simply in the same way that you would look for the answer to the quesiton, "why do you ask (about plugging the gap)?" or "why do you need to know (how to plug the gap)?".
(...)I've been working on trimming the fat from my writing. Know that I cut out 90% of what I originally wrote as a reply. The reason I'm saying this is so that you consider what you are about to read as significant and thought-out as if it was 90% longer. Some tend to think lots of word means lots of wisdom, but they'd be mixing up correlation and causation.
Try this:
Discursive thoughts are discursive thoughts. It's circular. You
will not find the answer
in thoughts like this, but you might find it
as thoughts like this - I did, trying to come up with a cool post for this thread.
Can you trace back your questioning? Simply, "why do ask these questions, Robert?".
You can be 'released' from your questioning. When you do drop the incessant sense-making, you'll find a mode where everything in obvious and immediate. I dunno whatever happens in the brain at that time, but you should try it out
(...)This is my third attempt at writing something to post in this thread. Know that I spent an irregularly long time coming up with what follows (except the list - that was surprisingly easy).
By dropping your discursive thoughts, you can arrive at a mode where everything is obvious and immediate, and you will not experience a need to have your questions answered. For someone like you, this will be eye opening - just as it was for me.
(I'm not talking PCE or anything like that, but simply stopping the self-inflicted pressure to know, figure out, make sense of.)
You are grasping for something solid. No such something exist. No matter what you find to fill the gap
(ex. "you'll be rid of emotional turbulence",
"you'll attain omniscience regarding all knowables",
"you'll never experience depression again",
"you'll be capable of astonishing mental acrobatics",
"you'll become kind and compassionate and loving and..."
"you'll see through the center-point and stop reifying those sensations with others",
"you'll feel light and experience will be more transparent, as a burden lifts",
"you'll live in an ever-happy fairytale-state the rest of your conscious life",
"you'll experience steady incremental increases in baseline mood and happiness",
"you'll never again experience self-narrative",
"you'll feel endless, infinite, caressing love flowing from the Heart",
"you'll experience an inexpressible deconstruction of existence",
"you'll see through the illusion and know it all to be dream-like", etc.),
there will be alternative perspectives and opinions about that - others will disagree and suggest ever-more stuffing/filling. And moving just a little bit to the left, or the right, or stepping a little back or a little forward, will reveal that that thing you filled the gap with is not that thing after all.
If you are merely looking for motivation to practice, you should realize so, and appropriately pursue that.
(...)4th attempt:
So *why* is it you practice insight meditation?
Through a insatiable hunger for growth (human potential) and mental challenge, I became very interested in the concept of Enlightenment. Subsequent research revealed that there's more to it than I've been taught through pop-culture. I wanted superlative, never-ending happiness and anything as close to omniscience as possible.
And why do you want to do that?
I think happiness is a natural drive. Omniscience had for myriad reasons been conflated with happiness.
But what's the point of that?
Happiness is fucking awesome. Omniscience is fucking cool.
You mean, you won't suffer *at all*?
Nope, not a single drop. I dunno if I'll get there, but given my current understanding of traditions and practices, and my own experiences and second/third-hand experiences, I'm pretty sure it's humanly/brainly possible.
(...)Shit happens. Breath. Just do it. Measure twice cut once. Do what makes you happy. Question the answer. Don't worry, be happy - there's nothing serious going on here.