Dear Lawrence, thank you for your patience. It feels like I’m able to get a little closer this morning. Just a little, mind..
With eyes closed notice there really is no seperation it is all one experience. There are now boundaries or seperation to anything.
Yes, I see that. It’s all just what’s happening in this moment. The darkness of my closed lids, the birds outside, faint hum of traffic, the warmth and pressure where my knees touch, it’s just what’s in experience. It's just experience. I notice that the mind-sense is the most absorbing – I get drawn into thoughts and they somehow take over the experiential space much more readily than the birdsong or the cars or the darkness. Thoughts have no greater reality than the sounds, but they seem to have a more encompassing tendency. How to put it – somehow I feel more “inside” them? The sense of “space” - for want of a better expression – around sensory experience is much more readily available with bodily sensations than thoughts, this morning at least. Yes, it seems that thoughts are dominating at the moment.
Open your eyes and this time just look through open eyes. Wherever you are notice that there are shapes and colours. Everything you see "mind" wants to label , because that is what "mind" has been told to do. like your name. It is just "thinging". It is shape form and colour. Sometimes it moves; sometimes not. It is just an experience happening. Everything you look and hear and smell is just happening. Only mind, using memory, labels it.
This is a lovely thing to do. I immediately look more closely at the features of the visual scene, noticing the texture and reflections in the lamp shade, the shape of the door panels, the shadows they create. The colour of the light. It feels somehow alien to look in this way, but on the other hand it also feels good, like being in closer contact with the space. I like the thought of labels coming from memory being applied to experiencing in the moment, it makes sense. I notice how I have to very consciously adapt to not having the label in mind when I look at something – strange, because it’s so unnecessary almost all of the time! It’s not as though I’m walking around conducting an inventory! Yet still, I look at the lamp, and somewhere in my mind, however faint, is the word ‘lamp’, the knowledge of what it 'is'. Totally superfluous. Yes, there was a feeling almost like a translation taking place from looking in the habitual way to just being visually aware of my current point of focus as an experience. But it was also quite easy once started. There’s a kind of fluidity in this dropping of the labels for things, but also a kind of intensity – vividness. Like more attention can be paid to what is there. I’ve had this experience with thoughts before, but so far not today. I will stick with this non-labelling, and see if that becomes possible again.
Are you seperate from the tree. Surely not. You would die without the tree as you would not die without your arm or lower body...and where does the tree sit...on the ground and needs to be nirtured by the soil. So you are not seperate from the soil, the tree and anything else at all. Everything is reliant on everything else, so there is no individual "I" that does anything.
Woah! Some of this I see and some of it is slightly blowing my mind. I’m definitely not here yet! Interdependency, yes – teachings of conditionality or emptiness I have engaged closely with in my Buddhist practice and I have had fairly brief but deep direct experiences of this too. It was a kind of sensing, but with absolute confidence, that what was being detected in that moment through my human senses was merely the tip of the iceberg of what 'is' – like the roots of that present moment as sensed extend deeply and broadly beyond. I don’t know if I’ve expressed that very well. It was a non-conceptual form of knowing that felt profound and true. What I can’t yet see or sense is that as a consequence of this, the non-individual “I” does not – cannot – do anything. I see the contradiction in what I’m saying! But I can’t wrap my head around what that means for living one’s life, deliberate cultivation of qualities… I know that’s not what we’re doing here. But it seems like this locates a sticking point for me. It seems possible to have spiritual aspirations and to actively cultivate more open-hearted, harmonious, skilful ways of being. They are thoughts at a certain point, but they are also lived ways of being-in-the-world. Does cultivation of this kind really depend on a separate “I”? Can't it be part of the process of life in some other way? I know it’s probably a naïve question, but I am struggling with it!
Huge gratitude, as always,
willing