Walk 8

• Expand, or contract consciousness, at will.
• If it is not your will, then the expansion and contraction will be controlled by circumstances.
• Meditation can go either way, it can either expand, or contract your consciousness.
• The type, and nature of intent plays a significant role. 
• The activity, of meditation, itself is repetitive and insentient. A mechanization at most.
• The mechanization however is needed as base to stand on.
• Gradually the repetitive activity will be lost.
• Consciousness defined by the intent, will remain.
• Both expansion and contraction have their own rewards, and necessity.

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• Shiva, without Shakti, was undifferentiated consciousness. 
• This undifferentiated consciousness is the self, but something other than ego.
• It is formless, and without attributes.
• Shiva created Shakti. The seer created the seen.
• Material world manifested out of consciousness, therefore. 

  

Walk 7

• Purpose of life is cessation of pain.
• Short term pain is acceptable if there is a promise of cessation down the line
• Consequently my reality is limited by amount of pain I can accept.
• Withholding of attention increases a sufferer's pain.
• If pain is all that is withholding me, then do people with pain asymbolia have unbounded reality?
• Auschwitz is another planet - those who have been there need no explanation, while those who have not, must accepted the limited scope of what is in their power to imagine, despite the massive amount of data at their disposal : Ka-Tzetnik.
• Two views
• Pain reduces the sufferer's world, obliterating language, consciousness, and interaction.
• Pain can lead to intellectual growth, moral benefit, and soul-fashoning 
• (From the book, Knowledge and Pain, edited by Esther Cohen et.al.) 
• So, it implies that self-flagellation will not lead me to enlightenment, neither will indifference to pain. Otherwise I would have saints in masochists, and in people with pain asymbolia.
• Back to square one. Again!