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Scripture Table
Welcome
I hope you will find something personally meaningful and helpful at the Scripture Table.
Scripture
Many are amazed; many experience this."Scripture" seems to refer to something real. It seems to be a technical term referring to a certain natural phenomenon:
There is a certain class of writings, which people can pick up, turn to any page, and read any paragraph, and everyone somehow has the experience: That is the perfect message for me in my current situation to solve my current problem. Such a class of writings, we may call "Scripture".
Situations and problems being different, this seems miraculous to everyone who picks up and reads one, and inexplicable to science.
How can this happen? How can it be?
It could be if...
- If we all suffer from some same certain form of emotional suffering, ...
- If that form exists as a certain mode of thought-structured feeling, ...
- If saints and sages, authors of Scripture, speak from an emotional being which is free from that suffering, and ...
- If humans hearing the words of one another empathize and synchronize to the emotional state of the other.
If these four conditions hold, then upon reading or hearing the words of such a scripture, each person will synchronize to the emotional being of the saint, will discover that the saint's emotional state is communicated to the reader, a state beyond suffering, their state.
Bliss Theory asserts that everyone suffers in the same way. What way?
As human organisms we use our cognitive abilities to track and to reason about ourselves, our evolving story and how good or bad it is going. This involves identification: the action which is a believing thought that I am some limited thing. The emotional system, in turn, observing this type of thought, serves it, by carrying out the emotion associated with the identified thought. And this emotional state of thinking I am a limited thing and therefore feeling I am a limited thing becomes everyone's prison. Your feelings are not in flow state, you are like a bound animal. If this is everyone's emotional state, then all suffer in the same way from the same problem produced by the same internal action, noone can escape by reasoning about themselves and figuring a path out, since that would be just another limited identification as the reasoner and path-taker. At the same time, the action of believing such a belief is an optional action. You might indeed be the thing you sometimes think that you are, but you don't need to think it all the time, do you? Do you think I am a runner being watched by supporters and detractors in the stands, when you run a race? You might, and it might be true, but it would be better for your performance if you just run the race, without spending your precious energy thinking that thought, which certainly makes you a worse runner, and makes you suffer from the feeling that your heart is busy trying to carry out for you as you spend your energies actively believing it. It is optional.
A person free from such mental activities is not bound emotionally by this phenomenon, by their heart slaving to the thought, and thus producing the emotion of its limited identity. Such a person is free emotionally, whether serene, or blissful, or in flow state, or operating with optimal skill and performance. Such a person is in touch with the divine, is experiencing the unlimited emotional flow and goodness which the unbound heart can experience. Such a person is in the emotional state shared by saints and sages.
You may consider this true or false, but it is a certain view, and it is the only view that I know of which explains the mystery of Scripture, of picking up some scripture, and reading some immediately-encountered short bit of it.
If it is true, then this Scripture Table, the one we are sitting at now, will bring you that experience.
I invite you to pick a scripture. Not your favorite scripture, just any scripture, and come into this space and read it to us. Others who come here will sit around this table with you, will hear what you say. Several will have the opportunity to say how that passage, how your reading of it, impacted them, how it informs them and gives them wisdom for their own experience and to approach their own life.
Please join a table with others now, or join asynchronously. Listen to or read others readings, and tell them how it strikes you. When it's your turn, pick up a scripture near you, click here, give us the reference including the title and page and publisher/edition, then read something to us. Others who are on line, will take their turn, and you can listen to what they got from what you read, and you can also listen to them.
I hope that this sharing experience will bring you joy and wisdom.
At the Scripture Table.
What is the Scripture Table?
At my meditation center, we would come for a morning program, chant for an hour singing the Guru Gita in Sanskrit, then go to the community room for breakfast.Most people would sit with their old friends and catch up on the week's activities; the grandkids news; the neighborhood dramas; the sparkle in each others' eyes.
But some of us would go sit at the table by a little bookshelf, which had a collection of books of and by gurus and saints, scriptures, there. Someone would pick out a random book full of sayings or writings of a great being. As we ate our savory cereal and drank our chai, each of us would take a turn picking a random page, a random paragraph or sentence, not a lot, and just reading what came up. One might skip a couple of lines or even a page, but mostly it was just what fate had chosen for us. The reader would read their bit, and the other people at the scripture table would hear it with great sincerity and stillness, and each would take their turn to put it into their own words, or say how that struck them personally.
It was a kind of miracle, how this process raised the level of the conversation from the logistics of last week's dramas to the highest wisdom taken by sincere seekers meaningfully into their own hearts.
I just loved the scripture table. Lately, the center is smaller, there is no breakfast, no bookshelf, no meeting other seekers around the scripture table.
So I'm trying to reconstruct it on line as a web application, which you have come to and found here.
Welcome
I hope this will work; I think this might work. Let's try.
Please Connect, click the buttons, and give yourself the space to experience something meaningful and perhaps liberating.
Thank you!