Hello!-JoshO

[Elad]

You are right you are incapable of understanding. You don't exist. Keep seeing how you are not choosing anything, including what is "chosen", just a play of habits and unfoldings, in many ways predictable, both the predictable and the unpredictable is not a choice, it just is. Keep seeing one moment at the time how thoughts, movements, moods, sensations,etc just come and go by themselves.

[JoshuaO]

Dear Elad -

My apologies: I fell asleep unintentionally and just woke up to find it very late; I will circle back tomorrow to rejoin our conversation.

Thank you again for your patience and understanding here. Talk to you again soon.

Best wishes from
Joshua

[Elad]

Dear Elad -

My apologies: I fell asleep unintentionally and just woke up to find it very late; I will circle back tomorrow to rejoin our conversation.

Thank you again for your patience and understanding here. Talk to you again soon.

Best wishes from
Joshua

Also, remember, you are good and loved as you are. Nothing needs to change with you, nothing needs to be worked with, nothing needs to be realized, except if from an inner loving will.

[Elad]

Also, it's this a fair assesment of your situation:

1) when you attentively look you find no separate self/controller/doer.

2) you keep thinking this might not be seeing or is not seeing.

3) (2) is a belief. You are not sure if you have seen or not.

(4) You imagine if you really saw there would be a bigger or more permanent change and selfing would lessen or change more, this is one reason you think you have not seen.

(5) (4) is a belief, not direct knowledge, and can easily be self-perpetuating when believed (think it's not it, so don't feel it, so deny it, so don't feel it, so imagine something better, so don't believe this is it, so don't feel it, so imagine something better... Etc).

Do you see all the above as correct?

If yes, and if we see thinking you have not seen doesn't seem to bring results. How about you try believing "you" have seen, that seeing is happening? That the voices that say otherwise are just habit thoughts without a self. And live with this orientation for a while instead of the one that has not worked for a long time, and see what happens?

How does it sound to you that we experiment with that for a while and see how it is for you? In this game your job will be to focus on collaborative evidence that its true that seeing is there and there is no self, rather then thoughts about why you might not have seen yet. And it will be part of the game to repeatedly drop all "knowledge" and fantasies and expectations about how it will/should be different, and see what happens?

[Elad]

*is* this a fair assesment of your situation

[JoshuaO]

Dear Elad -

When I first read your succession of notes to me earlier this afternoon and evening, my first response (that is, after responding “Yes!“ to your diagnosis of my situation) was that I blurted out the words “Elad, I love you!”

Yes, I see all of what you articulated as pretty much how it is and correct. And yes, I would very much like to proceed as you propose. It honestly gives a feeling of hope to me where there has been not much of one very recently. No one has ever suggested a protocol along the lines of what you just named, and I feel hopeful, as well as touched, truly, for you to be looking out for me this way. Thank you, Elad.

Life has been very full and a little bit challenging recently – nothing remotely, like the challenges that friends and family in your country have recently endured and are enduring, but still things have been busy, and challenging at least, and with the feeling of hopelessness about this effort/project/ambition/dream/hope/central ambition of my life, I have felt things to be that much more challenging generally. Your suggestion brings a tremendously welcome change of feeling, of hopefulness, even as I haven’t fully fathomed what it really may mean to proceed along the lines you suggest.

I will review what you have suggested again when I am not behind the wheel of a car… but for the moment, let me just say: yes, you bet, that sounds like a wonderful, unexpected, very possibly fruitful way to move forward. I am IN.

Many many thanks, sincerely, from
Joshua

[Elad]

Dear Elad -

When I first read your succession of notes to me earlier this afternoon and evening, my first response (that is, after responding “Yes!“ to your diagnosis of my situation) was that I blurted out the words “Elad, I love you!”

Yes, I see all of what you articulated as pretty much how it is and correct. And yes, I would very much like to proceed as you propose. It honestly gives a feeling of hope to me where there has been not much of one very recently. No one has ever suggested a protocol along the lines of what you just named, and I feel hopeful, as well as touched, truly, for you to be looking out for me this way. Thank you, Elad.

Life has been very full and a little bit challenging recently – nothing remotely, like the challenges that friends and family in your country have recently endured and are enduring, but still things have been busy, and challenging at least, and with the feeling of hopelessness about this effort/project/ambition/dream/hope/central ambition of my life, I have felt things to be that much more challenging generally. Your suggestion brings a tremendously welcome change of feeling, of hopefulness, even as I haven’t fully fathomed what it really may mean to proceed along the lines you suggest.

I will review what you have suggested again when I am not behind the wheel of a car… but for the moment, let me just say: yes, you bet, that sounds like a wonderful, unexpected, very possibly fruitful way to move forward. I am IN.

Many many thanks, sincerely, from
Joshua

Dear Joshua, I'm glad to read this. Your job and game is to attend to moment after moment of evidence that all is happening by itself without separate chooser/doer, including, always, the reaction NOW. Your other job/game is to repeatedly let go of expectations and fantasies how seeing is supposed to be different/more. Until next time :)

[JoshuaO]

Thank you Elad. Jumping into my new directives as Friday gets going. I look forward to checking in and updating you on what is seen and how it all unfurls.

Many thanks again from
Josh(ua)

[JoshuaO]

Dear Elad - Here’s what you said last time:

“Dear Joshua, I'm glad to read this. Your job and game is to attend to moment after moment of evidence that all is happening by itself without separate chooser/doer, including, always, the reaction NOW. Your other job/game is to repeatedly let go of expectations and fantasies how seeing is supposed to be different/more. Until next time :)”

Just checking in briefly this evening — I’ve been up this evening late(ish) with my older daughter, who is in high school and is feeling a bit overwhelmed with her schoolwork and needs a bit of company and help, and it’s been a little tough to get my own space and time to write to you.

“I think” that this new chapter of practice calls for a kind of regular, intermittent pausing, of really slowing down and really looking along the lines you called for, a kind of pausing that I have found challenging previously. When I just live in the habitual way, without slowing down to look, I feel identified with “the chooser” and “the doer.” I haven’t yet established a repetitive, effective practical habit of “attend(ing) to moment after moment of evidence that all is happening by itself without separate chooser/doer, including, always, the reaction NOW.” But I suspect that it needs to happen over and over and over, looking and looking and looking.

I will do more tomorow and check back in soon. As to “Your other job/game” which “is to repeatedly let go of expectations and fantasies how seeing is supposed to be different/more,” I will work on that too. Talk to you soon.

Best wishes from
Joshua

[JoshuaO]

Good morning Elad -

it's 10:46 on Saturday morning and I am mindful that I want to follow your direction today.

I've just had the first part of my morning,… and I'm noticing, even as I speak to you, that I'm looking to see that it is not a “doer” that does this speaking, which is a very interesting thing… and yet I'm following along, and the words are falling out of me without my doing anything. That I find interesting -- that is a part of the practice that I want to establish, actually. “I” don't know how these words are coming, strangely enough, and yet here, here, here, here they are, doing what they want to do and not what “I” direct, as if there were an “I”, which… does not exactly feel gone, but at the same time is definitely not in control of these individual words which are flowing out and across the limitless space to you right now, and being recorded so as to do so.

I have looked at your directive several times this morning, and I want to do so again while I'm here and read it into the record, as it were:

“Dear Joshua. I'm glad to read this. Your job and game is to attend to moment after moment of evidence that all is happening by itself without separate chooser/doer, including always the reaction NOW. Your other job/game is to repeatedly let go of expectations and fantasies, how seeing is supposed to be different/more. Until next time.”

OK so. It was good to begin this this morning. I just meditated, and I just sat with it… and I've been wondering… about what it means, that as a young child, as young children, we learn to do everything as if there were an “I”. We must be socialized, and we “individuate”, we learn to do, we learn agency, and then, for Chapter 2, it becomes essential to unlearn agency, so as to be freed of the “I Virus” at the other end of things. But that unlearning is very very rare, and yet without it…

Maybe this is too many thoughts, but I am just… I'm eager to pursue this, to follow along with what you suggested, moment to moment… moment after moment of evidence that “all is happening by itself, without separate chooser or doer.”

I'm reminded now of “acting before you think.” The “gate” to this entire decades-long process for me was the art of acting, in the theater, yes, beginning 30 years ago or more, when I studied with a great, perhaps a master teacher, whose work came out of the Meisner tradition and was summed up in a poster on his studio’s wall: “ACT BEFORE YOU THINK.”

We spend all of the first “book” of our lives learning to think before we act -- the first chapter of our lives. And then the second part -- the second book -- seems to be about finding out that there isn't actually really anyone there to do it, and that the identification with thinking creates a dividedness, an unwellness, from which everyone who suffers from it yearns to be freed.

I want to listen to the directions of Heaven, which are there without thinking, it seems to me. I want to follow your directions, Elad, very much. “Attend to moment after moment of evidence that all is happening by itself, without a separate chooser or doer, including always the reaction NOW.”

I think it's a little bit like breathing. It's the same way, maybe, that God… I mean “figuring this out” is surely not the point, but I still want to understand… and I have often looked at the phenomenon of breathing. It's an activity of life over which “you” can take partial, illusory control. You can try to hold your breath for as long as you want to try… but in the end you won't be able to take the breathing away from that which is breathing you.

It was Eckhart who put it so well in, maybe in that little book: Stillness Speaks.

Even the title of that book speaks to this. He didn't speak it. He didn't do any of it. And all of his teaching is about… getting out of the way. His teaching about Teaching is all about… getting out of the way… and letting what wants to teach, teach. And it isn’t You, because there isn't one.

This is an interesting strangeness.

I also tasted this in the experience of that Zen retreat I sat in March. The meditation practice, over the course of the Sesshin over those five full days, the experience of it was that the illusory thinker, the “individual”, the phantom-ego-person…the selfing-machine - was kept in check for a solid week. There was no opportunity for “Joshua” to reify himself through “selfing.”

Which may well be a big piece of what I’m doing through this writing.

Well, it was an experiment.
“Your other job/game is to repeatedly let go of expectations and fantasies, how seeing is supposed to be different or more.”

Seeing. Seeing is what's happening. Seeing does not require a separate self, a doer, in order to be happening all the time. Seeing is happening all the time. Seeing is happening silently. There’s possibility here. The practice wants to be done.

I want at some point, Elad, to talk about the fact that I feel some significance, or importance, or something, in the fact that you happen to be of Jewish background and that you live in, and may be a native of, the land of Israel. I must confess to feeling something strong, inexplicable, unfathomed, connected in here. It is felt here, related to that land, and that ancient tradition, and that people, and that devotion to the One.

Which I don't know how to say better than that at this moment.

Good morning to you Elad.

Thank you for your patience with my experiments here. I look forward to hearing from you again soon.

Best wishes from yours, truly
Joshua

[Elad]

Good morning Elad -

it's 10:46 on Saturday morning and I am mindful that I want to follow your direction today.

I've just had the first part of my morning,… and I'm noticing, even as I speak to you, that I'm looking to see that it is not a “doer” that does this speaking, which is a very interesting thing… and yet I'm following along, and the words are falling out of me without my doing anything. That I find interesting -- that is a part of the practice that I want to establish, actually. “I” don't know how these words are coming, strangely enough, and yet here, here, here, here they are, doing what they want to do and not what “I” direct, as if there were an “I”, which… does not exactly feel gone, but at the same time is definitely not in control of these individual words which are flowing out and across the limitless space to you right now, and being recorded so as to do so.

I have looked at your directive several times this morning, and I want to do so again while I'm here and read it into the record, as it were:

“Dear Joshua. I'm glad to read this. Your job and game is to attend to moment after moment of evidence that all is happening by itself without separate chooser/doer, including always the reaction NOW. Your other job/game is to repeatedly let go of expectations and fantasies, how seeing is supposed to be different/more. Until next time.”

OK so. It was good to begin this this morning. I just meditated, and I just sat with it… and I've been wondering… about what it means, that as a young child, as young children, we learn to do everything as if there were an “I”. We must be socialized, and we “individuate”, we learn to do, we learn agency, and then, for Chapter 2, it becomes essential to unlearn agency, so as to be freed of the “I Virus” at the other end of things. But that unlearning is very very rare, and yet without it…

Maybe this is too many thoughts, but I am just… I'm eager to pursue this, to follow along with what you suggested, moment to moment… moment after moment of evidence that “all is happening by itself, without separate chooser or doer.”

I'm reminded now of “acting before you think.” The “gate” to this entire decades-long process for me was the art of acting, in the theater, yes, beginning 30 years ago or more, when I studied with a great, perhaps a master teacher, whose work came out of the Meisner tradition and was summed up in a poster on his studio’s wall: “ACT BEFORE YOU THINK.”

We spend all of the first “book” of our lives learning to think before we act -- the first chapter of our lives. And then the second part -- the second book -- seems to be about finding out that there isn't actually really anyone there to do it, and that the identification with thinking creates a dividedness, an unwellness, from which everyone who suffers from it yearns to be freed.

I want to listen to the directions of Heaven, which are there without thinking, it seems to me. I want to follow your directions, Elad, very much. “Attend to moment after moment of evidence that all is happening by itself, without a separate chooser or doer, including always the reaction NOW.”

I think it's a little bit like breathing. It's the same way, maybe, that God… I mean “figuring this out” is surely not the point, but I still want to understand… and I have often looked at the phenomenon of breathing. It's an activity of life over which “you” can take partial, illusory control. You can try to hold your breath for as long as you want to try… but in the end you won't be able to take the breathing away from that which is breathing you.

It was Eckhart who put it so well in, maybe in that little book: Stillness Speaks.

Even the title of that book speaks to this. He didn't speak it. He didn't do any of it. And all of his teaching is about… getting out of the way. His teaching about Teaching is all about… getting out of the way… and letting what wants to teach, teach. And it isn’t You, because there isn't one.

This is an interesting strangeness.

I also tasted this in the experience of that Zen retreat I sat in March. The meditation practice, over the course of the Sesshin over those five full days, the experience of it was that the illusory thinker, the “individual”, the phantom-ego-person…the selfing-machine - was kept in check for a solid week. There was no opportunity for “Joshua” to reify himself through “selfing.”

Which may well be a big piece of what I’m doing through this writing.

Well, it was an experiment.
“Your other job/game is to repeatedly let go of expectations and fantasies, how seeing is supposed to be different or more.”

Seeing. Seeing is what's happening. Seeing does not require a separate self, a doer, in order to be happening all the time. Seeing is happening all the time. Seeing is happening silently. There’s possibility here. The practice wants to be done.

I want at some point, Elad, to talk about the fact that I feel some significance, or importance, or something, in the fact that you happen to be of Jewish background and that you live in, and may be a native of, the land of Israel. I must confess to feeling something strong, inexplicable, unfathomed, connected in here. It is felt here, related to that land, and that ancient tradition, and that people, and that devotion to the One.

Which I don't know how to say better than that at this moment.

Good morning to you Elad.

Thank you for your patience with my experiments here. I look forward to hearing from you again soon.

Best wishes from yours, truly
Joshua

Hi Joshua, good stuff. Keep playing this game: evidence for no self in real time + letting go of any expectations that awakening should be or feel different in any way shape or form.

Only improvement: for a period while we play this game stop writing about thinking there is an I or discussing if seeing is there or not or how it's going. Thats against the game. At the most write "thinking that there is an I and that seeing is not there or what needs to happen happens without choice and without self and it seen directly without choice and without self".

Re Israel/shared connection, let these meanings and sentiments emerge, but also don't write or think any of it without attending to and attesting to how it comes by itself.

Play hard! Stay in the game.

[Elad]

Also do this exercise INSIDE THE GAME, I.e. see how the seeing and answers happen by themselves:

Time Exercise

There is a general assumption that there is linear time that started (if started at all) somewhere very far in the past and advances to the distant future. The present moment (now) is considered to be a very small fragment of time, or an event that is moving forward on a linear line, coming from the past and advancing to the future.

But is there an experience of the ’now’ moving along the line of time? Any experience of one ‘moment’ giving way to the next?
Is there any actual or direct experience of one event following another?
How fast is the ‘present moment’ actually moving?
Just look at 'this moment', can you find a point where it began? How long does the ‘now’ last?
Where does the ‘now’ start, and where does it end?
When does the ‘now’ exactly become the 'past'?
What is the ‘past’ in actual experience?
So is there actual experience of ‘time’ or thoughts about ‘time’?

[JoshuaO]

Dear Elad -

Thank you for the guidance of your last two messages. Thank you again also for your patience with me here – it has become too late to write to you the way that I mean to, and so I’m going to head to bed and commence the work tomorrow. Talk to you soon.

Best wishes from
Joshua

[JoshuaO]

Dear Elad,

“Hi Joshua, good stuff. Keep playing this game: evidence for no self in real time + letting go of any expectations that awakening should be or feel different in any way shape or form.

Only improvement: for a period while we play this game stop writing about thinking there is an I or discussing if seeing is there or not or how it's going. Thats against the game. At the most write "thinking that there is an I and that seeing is not there or what needs to happen happens without choice and without self and it seen directly without choice and without self".

Re Israel/shared connection, let these meanings and sentiments emerge, but also don't write or think any of it without attending to and attesting to how it comes by itself.

Play hard! Stay in the game.
—
Also do this exercise INSIDE THE GAME, I.e. see how the seeing and answers happen by themselves:

Time Exercise

There is a general assumption that there is linear time that started (if started at all) somewhere very far in the past and advances to the distant future. The present moment (now) is considered to be a very small fragment of time, or an event that is moving forward on a linear line, coming from the past and advancing to the future.

But is there an experience of the ’now’ moving along the line of time? Any experience of one ‘moment’ giving way to the next?
Is there any actual or direct experience of one event following another?
How fast is the ‘present moment’ actually moving?
Just look at 'this moment', can you find a point where it began? How long does the ‘now’ last?
Where does the ‘now’ start, and where does it end?
When does the ‘now’ exactly become the 'past'?
What is the ‘past’ in actual experience?
So is there actual experience of ‘time’ or thoughts about ‘time’?”

Greetings Elad -

I think I'm gonna start with your “Time Exercise” here (INSIDE THE GAME) tonight; it's a wonderfully direct assignment. to which I can apply myself. Let’s go!

“is there an experience of the ‘now’ moving along the line of time?” No, of course there isn't. There's no “line of time.”

(This is another area that I will confess I've done some work in (“before” or “already”?), guided sometimes by teachings of Eckhart Tolle, so some of this may count as thoughts rather than direct perception now; I’ll try to be careful about this.

There is only one moment. Life…is, or happens, Now. The form that Now takes shifts constantly. “An Event,” it seems to me is a mentally created division of Life, chunk of Life, dreamt of as separate from the flowing whole by thought. In reality there are no “separate events.” The present moment is not moving “at a speed,” or moving at all. Now does not move. Forms are constantly shifting, shining, moving, Now. And now. And now.

It's not possible to point to where “this moment” began. Now is eternal — which is not a synonym for “everlasting” — the meaning of the word “eternity” is not “enduring forever,” but rather “untouched by time” or “does not have to do with time”.

Where does Now start, and where does it end? It does not start or end.

Now never becomes the past. “Now” is where aliveness is. Aliveness is always here/now.

What is the “past” in actual experience? Maybe it is mind/memory traces of previous experiences of “Now” — if it’s possible to say “previous” usefully or legitimately.

Is there actual experience of “time” or thoughts about time? Hm. Intuitively I want to say that there is no actual experience of time, that time is “not real”. It’s mind-created. I have heard and read elsewhere that “time” and “mind” are inextricably linked. Other than mind-based “experiences of time”, I suspect there aren’t any. Still need to keep looking at this.

Thank you for this opportunity, Elad. I appreciate your urging me to “Play hard!” That’s what I hope and plan and mean to do!

Best wishes from yours truly

Joshua

[Elad]

Dear Elad,

“Hi Joshua, good stuff. Keep playing this game: evidence for no self in real time + letting go of any expectations that awakening should be or feel different in any way shape or form.

Only improvement: for a period while we play this game stop writing about thinking there is an I or discussing if seeing is there or not or how it's going. Thats against the game. At the most write "thinking that there is an I and that seeing is not there or what needs to happen happens without choice and without self and it seen directly without choice and without self".

Re Israel/shared connection, let these meanings and sentiments emerge, but also don't write or think any of it without attending to and attesting to how it comes by itself.

Play hard! Stay in the game.
—
Also do this exercise INSIDE THE GAME, I.e. see how the seeing and answers happen by themselves:

Time Exercise

There is a general assumption that there is linear time that started (if started at all) somewhere very far in the past and advances to the distant future. The present moment (now) is considered to be a very small fragment of time, or an event that is moving forward on a linear line, coming from the past and advancing to the future.

But is there an experience of the ’now’ moving along the line of time? Any experience of one ‘moment’ giving way to the next?
Is there any actual or direct experience of one event following another?
How fast is the ‘present moment’ actually moving?
Just look at 'this moment', can you find a point where it began? How long does the ‘now’ last?
Where does the ‘now’ start, and where does it end?
When does the ‘now’ exactly become the 'past'?
What is the ‘past’ in actual experience?
So is there actual experience of ‘time’ or thoughts about ‘time’?”

Greetings Elad -

I think I'm gonna start with your “Time Exercise” here (INSIDE THE GAME) tonight; it's a wonderfully direct assignment. to which I can apply myself. Let’s go!

“is there an experience of the ‘now’ moving along the line of time?” No, of course there isn't. There's no “line of time.”

(This is another area that I will confess I've done some work in (“before” or “already”?), guided sometimes by teachings of Eckhart Tolle, so some of this may count as thoughts rather than direct perception now; I’ll try to be careful about this.

There is only one moment. Life…is, or happens, Now. The form that Now takes shifts constantly. “An Event,” it seems to me is a mentally created division of Life, chunk of Life, dreamt of as separate from the flowing whole by thought. In reality there are no “separate events.” The present moment is not moving “at a speed,” or moving at all. Now does not move. Forms are constantly shifting, shining, moving, Now. And now. And now.

It's not possible to point to where “this moment” began. Now is eternal — which is not a synonym for “everlasting” — the meaning of the word “eternity” is not “enduring forever,” but rather “untouched by time” or “does not have to do with time”.

Where does Now start, and where does it end? It does not start or end.

Now never becomes the past. “Now” is where aliveness is. Aliveness is always here/now.

What is the “past” in actual experience? Maybe it is mind/memory traces of previous experiences of “Now” — if it’s possible to say “previous” usefully or legitimately.

Is there actual experience of “time” or thoughts about time? Hm. Intuitively I want to say that there is no actual experience of time, that time is “not real”. It’s mind-created. I have heard and read elsewhere that “time” and “mind” are inextricably linked. Other than mind-based “experiences of time”, I suspect there aren’t any. Still need to keep looking at this.

Thank you for this opportunity, Elad. I appreciate your urging me to “Play hard!” That’s what I hope and plan and mean to do!

Best wishes from yours truly

Joshua

Good stuff. I would have liked some lines also about how the seeing and choosing of words came without a self/chooser doing it. Of course no one was in control of it not happening.

Now do this exercise, from inside the game: