Hey Ciaran. Don't worry, take as much time as you need with this. No one's in a rush here :)
I see it, concepts, mind telling me there are objects. More to question into here. Yeah, you did give me a lot of homework!
Yes keep exploring this. You can do this at any time, just look around. Stare until the labels drop and you can really see what's there, not a bunch of labels.
Not getting as many contractions. Feels deeply relaxing. Once or twice, I saw a bright light in my minds eye. I did change the inquiry, intuitively maybe today, I asked, ‘without labels, without concepts, without beliefs, what am I? What is the world? What is reality?. I had the contractions again in my solar plexus.
Beautiful. I like to give people a more concise one "What's not a thought?" You can try that out and see how it works for you. Keep coming back here, lots of juice. As soon as you notice a thought, let it go and return. You'll get to a point where there are no more gross thoughts, but it feels like some activity is still there. This is your activity of "monitoring for thoughts", it's the base "effort-ing" or "aware-ing" thought. If you can sit with just this for a while, see if you can let go of this thought too, and completely release all effort.
I’ve been bombarded a bit with thoughts. Doubts maybe, a thought I’m not catching that this awakening thing isn’t real, it’s quite a weird feeling with it, like it’s another world away or something.
Well, "awakening" is really just a word at the end of the day. It doesn't describe something that you can get or achieve, it's about falling away/deconstruction.
Thoughts too about eg. Do I have to stay in my work, who makes decisions if there’s no I, all the feelings and what I thought was intuitive glimpses over the past few years about my changing work to a healer or teacher or something spiritual, we’re they just too from the ‘I’? I feel that all of this too has to be let go off as it’s all the ‘I’, I’m getting hammered here at times though with thoughts, the doing, the planning, who this, who that! Feels big to let all of it go and that’s okay, there’s nothing really to let go.
There's a really deep belief here that an "I" is required for verbs to happen. It's a thing with English because we always put a subject before the verb. The words "doing" or "running" don't mean anything by themselves in English, because what's doing? What's running? Even with "raining", we say "It's raining", as if there's a thing that's raining. But no, "Raining" is grammatically incomplete, but no different from "It's raining".
Try this:
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10 Words
Type out the first 10 words that come to mind and post them here.
Here's my 10, I have no idea what the first one will be let alone the 10th -
coffee tick medicine give shake OK word rise say tea
(Actually they weren't the strict first 10, there seemed to be a selection process going on that said yes and no to the words that came up, but none of the process of word appearance or selection was known.)
Let me know what it's like for you. Were you the one who generated the words? And then were you the one who selected which words to put down? Where did the words come from?
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So, it's not to say that "doing" or "planning" cease, but a large portion of it that is triggered by fear/avoidance stops. Further, it's not as if thoughts about changing your career arise, and then YOU get to decide whether to act on them or not. Even the decision to act on them or not is just a thought that is habitually claimed to be "yours". Let all of it go, things continue to flow.
Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. 😄😄😄
