4) What was the last bit that pushed you over, made you look?
It was your question earlier on this dialogue about feeling where you asked:
Does experience have qualities such as pleasant, or unpleasant, soothing, threatening, etc?
That question seemed to be coming from a context familiar to me from Buddhism (vedana, nidanas, etc) and it took me a while to see that you were pointing to something other than I was assuming and expecting. Basically, my mind was getting in the way even though it was getting in the way with some valuable Buddhist teachings! But there was a moment of direct seeing and then more of them. And my normal ways of experience now seem to be filtered and not transparent, as if through a veil, or even as if in a dream. Not a nightmare, but the dream imposing on direct simplicity..
5) Describe decision, intention, free will, choice and control. What makes things happen? How does it work? What are you responsible for? Give examples from experience.
What makes things happen? Now there’s a question! Does anyone know the answer to that? In the past weeks, I’ve often been looking at myself acting and wondering how did that actually happen? when did I decide to turn and look out the window? I’m often not convinced that there was any decision at all! But still, things happen. Choices are made. Sometimes when I look I can only say it's a mystery - there is momentary movement of thoughts and feelings and things happen! Who'd have thought it!
Certainly, in experience, I see the past, my past, getting in the way of present directness. The past involves moving patterns - of emotions, of thoughts, of likes and dislikes - and those patterns have momentum and can intercede and make things happen. Being a well-trained Buddhist, I know how to recognise these as klesas which is basically what I mean by past patterns and veils. Unhelpful patterns can be pushed back, or at least pushed aside, with helpful patterns. It’s been a great boon to me to learn how to recognise and practice that on a thinking and feeling level.
An example, not recent, is the practice I’ve put into recognising patterns in me that stem from being adopted. No matter how good an adoption is, there are deeply set insecurities as well. Mine surfaced when I was in my 30s, a mother myself, and a regular meditator. It took a while, years, but I got to know and understand what I called my adoptive patterns and I knew what triggered them and I could mitigate them. All very well worth while doing. It opened up new choices and directions in my life and friendships.
But none of that work involved any direct seeing. The direct experence didn’t happen until some years later and came after some months of peronal angst when I had had the rug pulled out from under my assumptions of where my life was proceding. It triggered old fears around being abandoned. I took some months out to be more solitary and one morning was vaguely listening to the BBC Sunday Service of all things. Some words in it as I heard them prompted an experience of ‘falling through myself’ and directly seeing that a) up till then I had been holding myself together, or holding myself up in a way that was had been protecting a felt hollowness in me; and b) I hadn’t died as a result of letting go. The falling through experience dissolved that holding pattern, the hollowness was revealed as a delusion and turned into its opposite - an utterly reliable inner space of trusting confidence. The intensity of that experience has diminished with time but never been extinguished.
A recent experience was yesterday when on the phone to a friend whose dog I’ll be looking after next weekend. Listening to her lengthy instructions, even though presented tactfully as suggestions, about how to look after the dog, I was getting increasingly narked cos I know how to look after the dog. I could have used thought to stop that narkiness in its tracks. I didn’t do that. I just started listening directly to her. Narkiness disappeared. I understand what anxieties are involved for her. We both now trust that the dog will be fine.
The falling through experience was a one-off spectacular though it’s effects have remained firmly embedded. The telephone call yesterday was not spectacular but I sense it’s a way of being that’s more effective for its ordinariness.
As ever, I’m responsible for my actions, speech and my mental states. That hasn’t changed. Plus now I feel a responsibility to listen directly or see directly as much as I can. I still have my abilities to think things through when directness fails me. Or to be more precise when I fail to look directly. So far, my experience of directly looking is that it allows things to happen in a much simpler way. It’s mysterious still and it's very alive and I really really enjoy that!
6) Anything to add?
Well some words come to mind:
I’ve mentioned some of them before - feeling myself relaxed deeply, at ease. As I’m writing this I feeling gratitude. Open-hearted connected gratitude. To whom? I don’t know. Maybe to the universe!
The BBC ran a pilot Sci-fi series some years back called Outcasts. The blurb describes it as “A group of courageous pioneers face a unique opportunity: the chance to build a new and better future on another planet.” I really liked it. But it didn’t get high enough audience figures and they scapped it after eight episodes. At one point, one of the main character asks another main character if she ever wonders what the point of life is? To which the reply was “Well I think the point is just to be as completely part of it as you can.” These past weeks, I feel more completely part of being alive and I’m grateful for that.
