NowHere

[oboundless]

<t>Feelings in chest? None of the categorical ones you mention, more indicative: there's a certain dry advaita style that seems at the very least body-denying — I remember once talking with Francis Lucille about Wei Wu Wei, who Francis had met, and at the end of their conversation, which had affected Francis, he gave WWW a hug: "He was stiff as a board" Francis told me. Of course, this may have nothing to do with embodiment, nor with a dry style about the body. But I am aware of my body as a sensitive readout of experience....<br/>
<br/>
Talking of which ('I' 'my body'), of course I can't prove the existence of Glenn, although a couple of hours spent walking and digging into all the questions that come up is quite illuminating. All I know of 'Glenn' is transient — various experiences coming and going; thoughts, feelings, sensations, and images: the whole cluster of memories, and my accent and voice characteristics, body seen and body felt, themselves all passing experiences. Whatever is essential about Glenn — the mystery who knows all this, is the phrase I think you used — can only be approximated, isn't an experience, doesn't have a name, nor a gender, is made out of no-time. I feel stupid, Sunil for not fighting, dammit, but there is simply the paradox of a deep and lasting belief in Glenn, which keeps on self-referencing all those transient experiences as if they are where belief happens --- and the inexistence which shows up when this examination happens.</t>
What does Glenn consist of? If I were to argue for Glenn I would say 'These body sensations, and this form seen in this photo/mirror/by others, and the history and memories.' But reviewing these with care, all I can find is transience. I dislike the sense that I'm being PC in saying the latter, because the belief is NOT PC, but habitual, forceful, insistent, a deep groove....I'm repeating myself.

[oboundless]

Draft had weird formatting...

[kvotski]

Omg, Dude! There is no Francis nor WWW. THEY DO NOT EXIST. just ideas, thoughts, memories.
His stiff body can never be what you felt. Have you never felt the same or similar sensation? Is this a once in a life type of sense? Most senses are indescribable but we feel them under different scenarios. Try to think when else do you feel same in your chest? Not what Francis felt? What is an advaita feel? Get real.

Why are theses transient sensations, Glenn? You mean youre the body whose image you see in the mirror? Then a few years ago, that wasnt glenn? Surely you dont look the same as you did when you were 10?

No, i didnt implay Glenn is a mystery. What you are or I am is a mystery.

Is there a Glenn other than a label like Santa, football or wall or chair or a University?

If yes, prove it.

[oboundless]

I'll stay closer to what's being discussed.
Yes, "mystery" is the experientially-obvious essence at the core of all perceiving, NOT the endlessly changing (transient) experiences that show up in manifestation.
I'll sit with your last question:
Is there a Glenn other than a label like Santa, football or wall or chair or a University?

[kvotski]

Don't forget the chest flutter. Surely you've experienced a similar flutter, when and under what conditions?

No, you won't sit and write a doctoral thesis on this.

Simple questions.

Describe University

Describe Glenn

Now not after mulling it over.

[oboundless]

I may have mistaken what you implied when you asked me about the chest flutter, taking your words to be somewhat dismissive, even scornful. I apologize if I misinterpreted what you said and what you were, and are asking about.
All I was reflecting was that there seem to be particular body-sensations that go with deeper questioning -- that is, with the kind of questioning that seems to touch some layer of truth that I don't know about until I ask the question, explicitly and in words. "Does someone own this experience?" has an effect, when I ask it -- and all I was doing, am doing, was naming the effect. I feel cautious now, writing this, because I may say something utterly foolish and completely wrong. Something useless, wordy; seeming to elicit what I experience as sharpness from you.

Describe Glenn? The chap who feels cautious, and is risking saying something wrong. I can leave out 'chap' and say 'the feeling of risking wrongness.' The one with a long history -- many memories, and the feelings that go with them -- of flip-flopping back and forth from arrogance to shame. Is there such a one as the owner and originator of these experiences, or is that 'Glenn' simply a catch-all label for experiences that spool out in time and sequence?

Describe Glenn: The presumed owner of this seeing, hearing, feeling thinking. Can find those experiences; cannot find an owner of them. "The one" who experiences this inability to find an owner, that seems like Glenn, until, in this slowing-down process of looking and inquiring, there's recognizing that this 'one' is also another set of thoughts and images, memories-in-a-cluster.
Glenn is this body...and/or the sensations constituting this body -- suddenly seems so silly, in reality, to say this as if it's true, but most of the time it seems too, too true. But slowed-down, examined, there's just experiences here: sensations, thoughts, images: I can find no Glenn behind or at the root of all this, other than more of the same -- experiences, without any obvious experienc-er.
Describe Glenn: the label of the rag-bag of all these things. Sensations, experiences, thoughts, feelings, flowing along -- and the endless presumption of there being someone, Glenn, who is having them, noticing them, originating them!
Describe Glenn: the one who now has doubts about the utility of this process because when in the grocery store or having a stressful conversation with girlfriend later, will be completely convinced of Glenn's realness, because it's one thing to examine what 'Glenn' means here, quite another to bring this expanded, somewhat-marveling curiosity to all moments of life. Then a slow recognition: there are just doubts, made of thoughts and feelings, but there isn't actually a doubter.

[oboundless]

Describe Glenn: eye-sensations, constellation of facial expression, breath, thought ("Really?"), tingling legs, heard sounds....cannot find anything like an owner, an experience-r. Habit of assuming there is such a person SO strong.

[kvotski]

Hi Glenn,

I could apologise for being sharp with you and using words you misunderstood but i wont as it had a good effect and got you to look.

why is this habit so strong?

Surely you must have given up some bad habits, how?

I gave up smoking and chew nicorette. Is there a lesson there?

Do you still reminisce about the habits you gave up?

Do I wish i smoked again? Not on your life!

There are no personal scornful attacks here from me. Even if there were, they cant be personal. Do you get it?

Back to flutter in the chest. Does it ever happen when you are ecstatic?

Look deeply into actual body sensations like that. What are they? Is there a central location?

How Are these ephemeral sensations different from the assumed idea of Glenn?

If i threw a snowball at Dalai Lama, will he duck?

Or closer yet, if he had a girlfriend who insisted he eat brussel sprouts, would he be pissed?

Lets say he wouldnt although i doubt that, you could do also, after fifty years of doing nothing but sitting on a cushion for ten hour days. But so what?

Do you want to be HH Dalai Lama?

All we can do here is to see the truth. Nothing else.

[kvotski]

No matter how much effort you put in, throwing a pebble into a lake will create waves.

With the mind, all you can hope to achieve with clear knowledge, is that those waves are not imagined into a tsunami.

Mind having imagined tsunamis in the past will again try to do that. Reason, another part of the mind comes to the rescue.
When all these forces work together, peace results. Some call it unification of minds. But in my opinion its just nicorette subbing for cigarettes, far less toxic.

You have it, you lose it, you have it again, and so goes the waves in the real stillness which never really changes.

[oboundless]

Thanks Sunil,

I appreciated the shake-awake from you. You let me register the sting without making too much of it.

And I appreciate your very practical input about getting it and losing it. Each time I woke up in the night, the amazement, all the more for the spontaneously-apparent absence at the core (although those words aren't really adequate to the experience.) Some time this morning, interacting with my sister, or my girlfriend, the resumption of selfing, and the mirage of me seeming to reappear. I sit down to write this now and look again: owner here? Progenitor of these experiences? Discovering the answer is 'no' seems to make my heart — chest sensations —mildly squeeze and subtly ache.

More later: thank you so much.

[kvotski]

I feel that indescribable flutter all the time. Some call it Kundalini. Why not!

Don't forget to answer my questions, they are not rhetorical.

[oboundless]

Hi Sunil,

Why is this habit so strong? Beware: lecture upcoming!
Because you have to learn how to do this separate-seeming gig so you can be a member of the tribe. Everybody's doing it, especially the people you love the most. And most powerfully, shame is the emotional reinforcer that cements the adoption of the posture of separateness ("...a deviation of subjectivity onto an object in consciousness...": WWW) from 9 to 18 months. That's the time, says a massive amount of research, when there is a shame event for the infant about every nine minutes — and those are the moments when mom is letting the infant know; non-cognitively, by gesture and facial expression and voice tone that something they've done or been is wrong. Mom is shaping the infant into being a tribal member, and shame is very effective because it threatens to exclude you from the tribe, and then you'll die. The separate-seeming self feels so wrong because of the shame that enforced its creation (followed by even mentioning shame being taboo!) And it is so persistent and enduring for the same reason.

I could go on and on about this, but whatever the 'why' of it, it's pretty heavily practiced, isn't it? I've been doing it all my life until you nudged me into looking. It's a very, very bad habit — but unlike smoking (which I've also given up...) it's compulsory for just about everybody. For one thing, unless you adopt this dreadful habit, are infected by this dreadful illness, you don't suffer enough to undo it and come back to the place you never left.

Flutter in the chest: it occurs to me today that every bit of all of this — sights and sounds, thoughts and feelings, sensations and circumstances — the whole smorgasbord is nothing but love. I knew for a short while in my 20s that the universe is made of love, and nothing else, but not knew it stitch-by-stitch, as it were. Now I seem to be able to feel the subtle feeling of what's left over, so to speak, when all that I've taken myself to be is recognized to be just experiences.

And these ephemeral sensations are different from the assumed idea of Glenn because they seem like readouts of a much vaster truth. I cannot explain the lightness that's lived here today, as if everything were formerly stained by an ink — which in a certain instant turned out to be invisible. But the vibratory quality of this lightness is unmistakable, indeed, I suspect the lightness and the vibratory sense are something like each other. For a long time it has seemed to me that cultivating more and more subtle capacity to feel is absolutely essential for this awakening process: It's been said that the truth can be felt, but not known. If these ephemeral sensations have a center it's only because I've shifted to the system where I'm supposed to be inside a body — when I am the mystery the sensations palpably have neither center nor location.

I don't want to be the Dalai Lama, but I do admire his giggle, and his willingness to have tears and laughter go through him like gales. I don't know about him ducking. I do know I don't want to be a smoker again, there is no freedom at all in that. There are sometimes moments, when I'm very depressed or very ecstatic, that the impulse to smoke happens, but very quickly I recognize the impulse and images come from sudden mood states.

Seems to me that giving up bad habits isn't just a negative, but the adoption of something else: to finally stop smoking I made a deal with myself that I would feel everything, no matter what. In the present instance, shucking out of being someone separate has perhaps some of the same qualities: there's something else possible, that feels much better, and it's possible to get there, so to speak, by some sort of action like not lighting up a cigarette, or by seeing through experience as just experience, and not a self.

I appreciate you being sharp with me, thank you. I so deeply appreciate what you've done with me.

[kvotski]

Your words touch me, Glenn.

But I dont trust you yet.

Come back in a day or two.

[oboundless]

Thanks Sunil, I get it.

[oboundless]

Hi Sunil,

If I had written to you in most of the last 48 hours I would have said that the revelation I was experiencing a few days ago had vanished absolutely and forever. Then this morning, in the bathroom noticing that the sounds (in the conventional frame, "I'm hearing") are just as is, and not being heard by anybody. There isn't anybody, despite appearances, and everything is perfectly whole and entire at all times. There's never been a somebody, in actuality. Things just are as they are.

In these postings I quite often wax elaborate, or lyrical even. If I'm not particularly poetic in this one, I will say that at the moment testing this merest-and-most-important of all recognitions is like applying Occam's razor, with an adjunct: is it the simplest, and, does it bring peace? I'm not sure about peace per se, but it does bring that curious vibrating into the foreground -- and this vibrating comes from recognizing that everything is completely perfect, as it is, in the moment -- absent the mirage of somebody.

And I find myself wondering if your not trusting me (which I entirely trusted...) might have to do with the fact that when this gets hijacked by a newly-resumed I....well, snafu.

Thanks in perpetuity for hanging in with me.