NowHere

[kvotski]

Hi Glenn,

You didnt quite answer my first question. Is there anything other than direct experience? What is it? And how would you know?

So, components of shame are directly experienced by the body. Is that experience different from having a chest pain or a chill or stomache ache?

If nothing can be changed, how can events that lead to shame, which is a thought imposed on certain bodily sensations, ever be any different?

If they could not be different, shame which is based on a regret is Like any other historical thought. Same could be said about all emotional response to a thought, an idea, a concept.

We react to a rope that looks like a snake but not after we have realised its true identity.

So what is the true identity of shame?

One point i wanted to make to you, often particularly long journey men like us, this all seems too easy. What if it is really easy and it is in mind's habitual norm to make it complicated?

What if it is the men who didnt quite understand it, get it, made it seem too hard becuase it was too hard for them?

[kvotski]

P.S.

Let me try another pointing to you.

All emotions have two components, a thought and a direct experience in the body. Shame is no exception.

So when we say we "feel" shame, anger, joy, etc. aren't there these same two?

Thoughts manifest as a sensation in the body when we attach this idea of "me" or "mine" to it. Another person's shame may be literally the same idea but has no or little heaviness to this body.

Liberation is to be free of this weight. That's what we need to do. I know it is easy to say but requires repeated and prompt access to the knowledge that there is no "santa" to make it a second nature.

[oboundless]

Thanks Sunil,

No Santa = no I?
Repeated and prompt access to the knowledge there is no "I"?
Repeated and prompt access to DE?

I don't think there is anything other than DE -- except, doesn't DE include the thoughts upon which the imagination of a separate self is based? I can sense the imagination of "I" (a concatenation of thoughts, images, sensations, hormonal flows, gosh-knows what else) -- aren't all these components in DE, although what they imply, a self, isn't? I'm not debating you here, just having any confusion I may have laid bare. At the moment I feel like the longest-journey man, and likely to fail in these travels to nowhere.
So anything other than DE would be....kinda like Santa. But your final question, How would you know? implies to me that the correct answer to the prior question of 'Is there anything other than DE?' is no. Then I don't know how to account for the imagination, of bridges and iPhones...and "I." Sorry to be so complex, you are right about that, I think. A western intellectual.

Sometimes I can be helpful in therapy because I can sit with someone in their experience, empathically feeling it alongside them but without the heaviness they are carrying. I know my own heaviness is just that, because all the DE looks like it belongs to someone, that would be 'me.' And, no, my shame experiences are no different than a chill or an ache (which, when seen as 'mine' are problems.)

The true identity of shame? I suppose it is as you say, a mix of thoughts and feelings, made problematic by the "I"dentity. But I'm shooting in the dark at lot in this posting, because I have a sense there's some right answers, and I can't spontaneously see them.

Bit despairing here, Sunil; I am grateful for your continued efforts to help.

[kvotski]

Hi Glenn,

Something i faced myself and it resurfaces, a implied belief that because a separate self doesn't exist, it is evil or to be avoided. That is impossible since i have to go to the bank who will not give me money unless i pretend to be a separate self who owns the account, knowing full well none of this is so. It is the convention of using personal pronoun that makes it worse kind of makes you feel an impostor. Which is true, the separate self is an impostor.

So in that way it is more complex than Santa. Every one knows Santa isn't but only I know that Sunil isn't.

No, DE doesn't include the complex concept of thought. Thought is a sensation which can be directly experienced but the contents of thoughts are mostly bogus. Ex, i can imagine a glass of champagne and chocolate cake and even feel salivation but cant eat it. I can imagine and pretend to be me, even enjoy the fake dream but there is no me. Contrasting that to the apple slice you experienced right there no imagination required.

In a way LU process is limited as it takes uou to see no self. If you go further even DE is a conceptual process. Hear, touch, see, smell, taste and think are all labels to a beautiful creation which we experience. A brain imposes a story and makes it a world and an imaginary me experiencing the world. This is the emptiness teaching and it may be where you need to explore for clarity. Sometimes a Ph.D. Is needed to do a mundane task.

Dig deep and keep airing the folds. Im here.

[oboundless]

Hi Sunil,

I have the word 'retrenchment' in my mind, 'reduction in the extent or quantity of something' (in this case, the sense of ease that seemed present a few days ago) — was hiking today and aware of expecting some kind of a 'pop,' of being subtly paused as if something's going to happen that will help with this awful sense that I'm not getting it.

I read some of the articles on the homepage, Greg Goode, Ilona, Elena, Paul Hedderman, some of whom (Greg, Paul) I've actually spoken with: reading what they say it's a bit like chewing sawdust. Perfect sense, all of it. Quite astonishing really how what seems so lucidly obvious a few days ago is now lost in a miasma of thinking.

The misery of thinking is How can I get it? As if I could lose it. And in the two sessions with clients today, familiar experience of giving myself totally to attend to someone else - and have the misery vanish. (And, I know, misery means I'm making a big mistake....)

"All mental affliction is entirely fictional as the one afflicted itself is fiction." "Do you see this?" ; "How do you know it beyond the shadow of a doubt?" (Your post of yesterday morning) I feel oddly dull Sunil, and will take another shot at this tomorrow morning.

Thanks for doing this with me.

[kvotski]

Hi Glenn,

I know sawdust.

Buddha and his teaching of impermanence always helps me. Breath in, breath out. Confusion in, out. Only wisdom remains. Mind creates the saw dust and then chews on it

Look, there is only wisdom. All else pure bs including this dialogue.

[kvotski]

Hi Glenn,

I have to use the zen stick on you.

How could you possibly practise awakening psychotherapy if you don't see that " all mental affliction is fiction as the one afflicted itself is fiction" ?

Much of what you must face is based on paranoia, Hedderman says FEAR = false evidence appearing real.

Please find examples of cases where this is not true.

What would you do to help the client if you dont point her to the fictional nature of the ailment and the ailing?

Is it possible thats why feel so much peace when you are counselling clients, you swim in truth?

Physician heal thyself.

[kvotski]

Until it happens in a flash, I agree with Spira here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mWq4OjkZ6I

[oboundless]

Thanks Sunil,

I appreciate the stick but it hits empty air, since awakening psychotherapy is more a dream and a vision than anything I've put out or actually practice. Part of not putting it out is that I have such extreme doubts about myself, somewhere in the dream hinterlands between I'm-supposed-to-be-somebody-who-could-be-awake (which I know is absurd) and the indubitability of what Rupert mentions.

'I am pure awareness.' Hmmm: tell me if the following is just me making this much more complex than it needs to be:

Reading out from direct experience there is some substrate of all experience that is lucidly relaxed and spacious. It is silent and entirely non-doing. It is never not here. Nothing can be done about it: breathing, heartbeat, thoughts, all are perceptible — or even, exist — by virtue of it. This was first noticed by turning attention backward: as I'm writing this I look up again the first two Upanishads and the dialogue between death and Nachiketas, in which death says 'Now and again a daring soul, desiring immortality, has looked back and found himself.'
It is causeless, and the dimensions of time and space are completely inapplicable to it, which I think corresponds to it being infinite and eternal. There is nothing whatsoever personal about it, although with a little poetic stretching I could say it welcomes the entirely personal with just the same unconditionality as it takes in the utmost horrors of war. Put more bluntly, there is nobody here in this. Except a concatenation of thoughts, feelings, images, sensations and so forth that make up what seems to be a self.

And here's my beef with this perspective: when thought falls silent this substrate vanishes as something seemingly separate. Then there's just an existing miracle, the allness, the one without a second, the onlyness: the not-two. Nobody here and everything is. When the cacophony of thought starts up again there can be a bit of hanging on to the realization of the empty luminous lucidity, but very soon it is drowned beneath the tidal wave of familiar me-thoughts.

I think the easing and relative peace I feel when I'm sitting with clients is because the very best of me — sensing, intuiting, empathizing, taking the place of the other, as it were, is way predominant over self-concern. I can flicker in and out of I am not, and only the other is, and I-am-not is the very best circumstance under which to sense the subtle interior flows of thought-image-sensation-feeling which can now move in the service of healing in the room, because self-preoccupation where I am supposed to be is in abeyance for the time being, and it is lovely that it is so. I don't speak this stuff to clients mostly, except the ones who are accomplished in this inner dimension.

Personally I slightly more like 'Feeling Ego As Real,' And I do suspect, following this thread and your invitation to point out the fictions to the client, that there's a worry that I would quite simply completely go bust financially if all purpose of the therapy came to an abrupt halt with this knowing.

"All mental affliction is entirely fictional as the one afflicted itself is fiction." "Do you see this?" Seems like a battle of some kind at the level of 'soul,' essence Sunil: what I wrote about DE earlier In this posting, especially the first part about the intangible substrate, is entirely true in my experience, and has long been so. A fictitious affliction? Gosh, how strong is the momentum of seeming-evidence to the contrary!!

This feels very raw and naked, and I appreciate being able to do it with you. Thank you.

[oboundless]

...and kindly excuse the big guns of death & Nachiketas!

[kvotski]

Hi Glenn,

Great post. The katha upanishad which somehow became the sacred Tibetan book of the dead, is one of my favourite. Although i like most of them except when the teachers perhaps high on soma or hashish elaborate on their dream creatures with animal heads, multiple arms, time travel. Although who can tell, perhaps i will experience them too and this will look like a dream and that reality. But for now let the big guns stay silent.

I would like to point you to how you perceive the experienced onlyness or all as some how separated when the noise of sensations and thoughts rush in. This virtual separation may be your achille's heel. Look and listen carefully of the silence that is always there. In meditation, be it on a cushion, lost in reverie or laser foucused on your clients, it is the silence that makes it so pleasant. Your beef seems to be the noise becoming more in focus drowning the silence. This is our habitual addiction to the noise. It could be a chemical thing, brain trained to produce seemingly happy chemicals in search of the peace it just abandoned. It wouldnt be the first time the brain got it wrong. Fortunately a part of it also has the ability to recognise the ruse. It is this sceptic that needs to not reject but see through the game thats afoot.

i agree with the hmmm on Spira, he is just too preppy a boy eager to give an answer and a name. I once skyped with him and found he could never say yes you are right. He was compelled to find an intellectual angle to correct. Must be his proximity to Oxford, which is where my thesis superviror was from and reeked the same.

But teachers are just labels, instruments to transmit the truth that is the open secret.

I dont believe the struggle is at the soul level, as that too is an affliction of the nonexistent mind. That ego is real, is just another thought with strong self preservation as its prime directive.

Can you answer this question upon reflection; why do you let one set of thoughts dominate another?

At our age if we insist on Santa being real and found a few million others to agree with us, it would become a Santa cult.

We are all in jonestown drinking the cool aid. Rejecting all but DE is not the truth to me, it is the simplest way to avoid getting swayed by the almighty thinking machine. All meditation practices use this technology to loosen the grip and so are advaita and Buddhist insight and emptiness teachings.

You know all there is to know but you are trying to awaken from the sleep in a special way.

Remember that zen saying, fetch water, do dishes after enlightenment. Teachers are good for this to simply show us that it can indeed be done.

[oboundless]

Thank you Sunil,

I was going to write you yesterday and say "Look, the real truth is that I believe in a self." (As I write this now there is the slow left-field entry of the question of who, or what that is who believes that....) Today something in your latest post caught and tugged intuition.

"This virtual separation may be your Achilles' heel." This was one of those comments of yours that made the chassis judder and reverberate. Since the longest time, reading and contemplating a la Douglas Harding there was the endlessly persistent sense in observation that I was turning backward — as if self-I continued to exist, amidst the infinity revealed by the inward pointing finger. As I digested the reverberations of that remark of yours today there is a glimmer of the noticing that there's probably only noticing noticing itself. Yes, really: OMG, what if that's all that's ever true? What if it's never been I noticing the noticing, because the I is fictitious and only the dimensionless noticing exists.....except it doesn't.

A lot of wondering (mild astonishment, top-of-my-head distinctly airy feeling) spaciousness here.

And, some particulars about your latest post, for which, thank you: could you please be more specific about the parameters of your question 'Why do you let one set of thoughts dominate another?'

"You know all there is to know but you are trying to awaken from the sleep in a special way." I'm not self-consciously doing anything of that kind (although I grant you I have been called both 'stubborn' and 'complex' before now....)

[kvotski]

Hi Glenn,
Thank you for letting the "truth about believing in Self" slip through. You have to nail that one down. Have you considered that some beliefs may be all of them are WRONG not true?

That's what I meant thought hiding as a false belief dominates over liberating aha's you have. The wrong generals are running the war.

You are trying to awaken in a way that is planted in your head based on years of looking. We all want the fireworks until it dawns that not everyone is programmed the same way so decommissioning won't be the same. this is surrender, quite often the essential last step.

What you imagine to be liberation is just a fanciful idea.

Wake up.

[oboundless]

Thanks Sunil,

This one was more of a Zen stick. And since it has an effect on me — shadowy thoughts that Sunil thinks less of me now; sensations/feelings of wanting to expose less vulnerability; some altered-'self-sense' (image/thought/feeling/sensation) — I'm curious that I believe less in self after the last few exchanges, particularly since your remark about virtual separation — and, what is this me that is affected by the Zen stick?

Perhaps I have elaborate imaginations about what liberation is, but I don't know what those imaginations are. I know at this point that I over and over again look to see if what I take to be me is anything but experiences, and there's something akin to increasing-raggedness about the answer.

But your remark about what I imagine to be liberation, sharply goes to the point. I suspect here's nothing to get in liberation, is there? Except being set free from there being anything but this very now, which is very relaxed, and utterly available without the slightest effort. And writing the latter two sentences seems like mush, too. There's nothing whatsoever to get, is there?

[kvotski]

Not a thing to get.


No one here to get.