The Gate

Sorry, dashed past these in the ecstasy.

2 apple slices, one with yogurt on it. Which to eat?
Compare images of mouth feel - desirability: simply sweet, a little unadorned (no words are really good, it's a non-linguistic and more directly imaginal process)? Or the same with a trace of fat and sour? Sense of stomach feel too. Memories of past experience of both. Compare salivation reaction to both. Sense positional preference: leaning to left, and thought: 'Does that mean left is best, +yogurt? Salivation seems to indicate better +yogurt. Image of reaching toward left, +yogurt. OK, +yogurt. Eat. (Then eat second slice!)

As I've studied 'decision-making' in my life it has seemed always that there's some sense, ultimately, of the 'choice' I'm going to make approaching me from the horizon of my life, gradually becoming obvious as the one that will be taken. But I have never been big on the concept of choice, and much less so since finding out about Benjamin Libet's rigorous experiments. Libet's results say that he could predict, with about 100% accuracy, from his measurements of electrodes placed in my brain that I'm going to choose the slice with the yogurt - and he could make this reading about 30 seconds before I indicated 'my' conscious 'choice.'

Walking mindfully. Attempting to be as relaxed back into now as possible/come out of my head. Music coming from tv in next room, and clear sense of the magic of the movement happening by itself, when there's not interference by thought. In thought, some of the same kind of subtle flickerings of body momentum/positional inclination/somatic and pictorial images as took place with the apple slices.
No, not deciding to take each step. In truth, happening.

Those words weren't meant to be smart. It's been a revelatory day, your promptings and reflections ('the complete absence of a separate self' ; 'You can't stay with the truth, it is as it is.') opening for me this morning the clear noticing that relaxed in now = come back to seeing no-one here = being everything = ease and inexplicable globality. What I've always missed, until recently, is that in now there's no one AND this is the nature of existing AND thought can't touch this. The result, so to speak is obvious, and, there's no way to say it the way it really is. Blessing? Benediction?

Thanks very much Sunil.

Hi Glenn

Wonderful.

Steep into this for a while.

Ttyl.

Thanks Sunil,
It is as it is...... I will write again tomorrow: I feel very grateful for your help. And hope we can continue.
Glenn

Nice.

Perhaps you should read what you wrote at the beginning of this journey on the forum. And see if you have achieved what you set out.

Are there lingering doubts and concerns?

An interesting take on choices by spira.

https://youtu.be/G6oUw54MLXw

Thanks Sunil,

Our dialog continues to be so helpful.

After a day yesterday marked by a seeming gradual colonization of open being (no-one here, only the whole) by the habitual momentum of thinking-selfing -- all morning today there are periodic glimpses into nowness - 'Oh, no-one here: pristine, open, empty, lucid, trouble-free!' Your invitation precipitates and sharpens this recognizing.
A moment ago there was a thought about the effort involved in staying NowHere, but in reality only relaxation reveals it. No-self is the nature of now, the unconditional now.

My writing was interrupted by some teen kids setting of a firework outside my window, abruptly puncturing the contemplative flow about how lovely the present moment is! Then rapidly escalating fear-anger-body activation, going out and talking to them, at first angrily and protectively, then more truthfully about how I was feeling scared...now back at the keyboard. This is why those old zen teachers would throw their dreaming students out of windows!

Have I achieved what I set out to? Welllllll....the activation when I first spoke to those kids was uncomfortable, as were the thoughts later about whether I upset my neighbor by talking energetically to her son's friends, amidst the loud smell of gunpowder!....I am substantially clearer about where-when life actually is: NowHere, where it's whole and complete, and there is no-one.
The images I carry of impeturbability (Jean Klein, sitting in a local bookstore, for all the the world like a vacant space; Osho, calmly watching a knife being thrown at him by someone near me in the audience in early India days) have perhaps influenced what I think is possible, indeed, what I aspire to and perhaps what I put in those early responses on this journey with LU. Is there something more to get now I know with 100% surety the always-here living truth is without anybody separate in it - or is that, as Rupert says in that video clip, merely an early point in chapter 1 or 2 of the 12 chapter book of the awakened life? You spoke about meditating on what you are, and my version of that would be recognizing again and again that in now, there is simply what it is, and no one. That does not, however, preclude dashing off into the thought version of myself, where the suffering lives. You perhaps have to tell me, Sunil whether there is more to do than this.

Rupert has such expressive lucidity -- I spent years with Jean Klein, then Francis Lucille subsequently, and have done a number of retreats with Rupert (so much attention to this, such halting progress....!) Thank you for the clip. I know for sure I don't have the same exquisitely hand-thrown porcelain constructions about reality that Rupert so elegantly offers. Perhaps I prefer Walt Whitman's more poetic and more diffusing into the heart "Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."

I hope you are well.

Hi Glenn,

Your connections are deep and you have touched much.

Just like bicep curls eventually leads to an ease with which a fit man or woman can pick up pretty heavy objects, deeper and perhaps longer living with the truth reduces the time period a perturbing thought stays with us. Impact of years of meditation is obvious in the poise of spira, mooji, thich na han or Eckhart to name a few.

So to answer your question to me, yes indeed there is something to do and that is to live with what we know to be true. Fall and quickly recover.

There is also a way to interact with others here on LU or many other FB groups or in local satsang which is what I do. Interacting with you has been a real test and refresher of what I know to be true.

If you wish to become a guide here and help others, let me know and I can send you the questions, answers to which will be reviewed by three other guides. The volunteer guides here will then invite you to join the group if you wish.

In any event this thread remains open for you to check, test, doubt, question again and again. I'd be delighted.

One challenge I make to friends who drop into our weekly satsang is, if you are unhappy you are making a big mistake. So far to the Glee of challengers, I have always found the supporting arguments.

It's wonderful, isn't it?

Thanks Sunil,

I am pretty staggered by the power of this kind of dialog, as if movement was waiting to happen, and in the space of "Two or more gathered in my name," this pent-up energy has become, can become, dynamic. I wrote to a friend tonight "...today, the utter paradox that we are inescapably NowHere -- and that there is nobody whatsoever HereNow. And whatever 'we' truly 'are' .... finds this completely non-paradoxical!"

You had me lol when you said in your message; "If you are unhappy you are making a big mistake," -- and deeply feel appreciative when you mentioned falling and quickly recovering: ''living with (or as...) what we know to be true.''

And, I hope "Interacting with you has been a real test and refresher of what I know to be true" has not been because I have been a pain-in-the-backside correspondent; I have SO much appreciated your alternation, seemingly spontaneously, of sharp wisdom and questioning with bohemian ease and humor. I think the answer to my implied question about possibly being a pain in the ass is that you said this thread remains open, and you'd be delighted to let me check, test, doubt, question again and again.

This brings me to something that I am shy about, which simply means it is close to my heart, as well as related to the invitations you make in your most recent posting. I have greatly valued our dialogue, and profoundly feel the beneficial effect of it. My movement into the topic (coming up!) I am shy about comes from the possibility, felt in my heart, that there is no such thing as a benefit which accrues in only one direction. The pat phrase I would use is that healing is absolutely nothing but wholeness, having its way, so to speak: radiating to itself, unendingly.

My professional life is as a psychotherapist, a profession that I first seemed to make up by myself, and then occupied the official and licensed domain of. I feel very uncomfortable with the implicit supposition that I'm some kind of a doctor because unlike a medical doctor I bring to the domain of my meeting with people the paradoxical reality that all is already well. When I sit with one of the — admittedly relatively few — people where this infinitely-widening dance can become joyous I feel inspired again again to create a kind of psychotherapy that enters infinity and eternity through suffering, as if agony is nothing but the way ecstasy points to the doorway to itself. In the linear world of engineering solutions to problems this is flat-out absurd — but what to do? We are, in truth, so far from linear that it is the solutions that are absurd. (Excuse me becoming polemical, it's one of my trademark protections....)

And, polemics are protective of the tender joy I feel when sessions with a client show up in which there is undeniably deepening shared access to the ocean of being in which they and I are nothing but absolutely unique waves, joyously gesturing to one another, full well knowing our true nature is nothing but this, this, this. Psychotherapy in this frame has an exultation and an intimacy to it that begs it not to be included in the doctor-healing-patient model.

The process of this — I call it 'awakening psychotherapy' — melts together the domains of psychology and awakening. And if there's something I need to check, test, doubt and question it is whether I am simply confusing a means of making a living with something that is, in all truth, purely and only to be given away because it was given utterly freely in the very beginning of life. I have many times in my life brought personal suffering to spiritual community only to have it squeezed into transcendence, which is the same as repressing it. I don't know a spiritual domain in which I can bring my personal struggles and have them met, face-to-face — although this domain, and this dialogue with you, Sunil, perhaps comes closest.

So you can see how your invitation to me to become a guide — which I very much appreciate, feel touched by, and feel inclined to say yes to — runs directly into this question, and brings to the surface the doubt that I've really not been able to adequately give voice to before now.

Any thoughts you might have about this I would very much value. And if you would care to send me those questions, and I will do my best to answer them without polemicism!

My best to you.
Glenn

Hi Glenn,

The concept of separte self is like rote memory, hardwired into our brians by now. If i asked you can you remember the moment you learnt 2+2 is 4, will you remember it? And as Krishnamurti said in one of his "lets think it together" thoughts originate from memory, the separate self hides itself way deep into the folds of neurons.

I am concerned that you may not have aired the folds yet. Is there an underlying fear that the ennui will return?
Dig deep and open it up here and now.

Why should there be a concern about your wonderful chosen profession of awakening psychotherapy?

Is it because you may charge a fee?

When you buy groceries you are paying someone for your birth right to feed a body. Isnt money simply a piece of paper accepted by a group of monkeys as a way to trade one skill with another?

Having said that if i refuse to help another becuase they dont have that paper, that is return to the big mistake imo.

Lets deal with this as i do not want this to be another of the many spiritual squeeze sessions you have experienced. This has to end some time, so why not now?

Thanks Sunil,

LOL at monkeys trading skills with one another, lovely, relieving, wise.
Another long post follows, incipient shame about it!

Short form:
Fear?
Yes, to do with this seeing.
Shame swims up, a lifelong companion of mine.
Return to childlike innocence? Danger! - Shame!
Fear. And how to move even deeper?

I'm not aware of fear that the ennui will return. When there's seeing-now, there's visibly nobody like story-I on display. And, there's rueful awareness of how very habitual is the crowding-in of a dulled sense of story-I.

Perhaps that 'crowding-in' corresponds to your wondering if I have 'aired the folds,' or rather, not aired them. A couple of days back, amidst the revelation that now is the whole, access to the truth seemed to flow more steadily. This morning, walking with a friend and talking about the simplicity of this, I was (again ruefully!) aware that Dudjom Rinpoche's "...pure awareness of nowness is the real buddha..." mentions awareness-of, not just the inescapable nowness.

So helpful to pause with this, now. The arrival is slow, of noticing that this "uncontrived, open, and natural state" (Dudjom Rinpoche again - btw, I'm not a TB in any way....these are just very expressive words) is unceasing "aimless self-liberation." Put another way, story-I wants to have this, claim this, use this — but the marvel and miracle of it is that it's self-existing, self-noticing, and anybody claiming it is an imposter. But it seems like the slowing down and the inhabitation of spaciousness, so to speak, is on the timescale of eternity, not the rapid transit of thinking, able to get to Paris faster than light.

I've speculated that spiritual teachers spend as much of their time as possible immersed in this recognizing – by teaching it. Your invitation to air the folds facilitates my dropping out of my head and into this seeing. This seeing has been here all along — just disoriented ("...a deviation of subjectivity onto an object in consciousness," Wei Wu Wei) by the apparent presence of someone seeing. LU and this dialogue with you goes straight to the heart of this.

Forgive me for my meandering Sunil. Is there indeed some fear, hiding in the folds that compels me back into thought-story-I? My reflections go back to when I asked Osho the very first, and only innocent question I ever posed to him: "What do you mean when you say 'go in'?" and he talked about Western intellectuals being gripped by the need to name everything, and said "When the mind is empty, you are in." For a very long time thereafter I thought he meant I had to be someone with an empty mind, which is impossible. And, this lucid seeing is fully in (....no in and no out...) — and now I seem to be able to feel something like fear pressing up into the top of my solar plexus because it is, or seems dangerous to be in this seeing. Being so much in my head in those early India days was completely a hidden expression of fear: I can feel it now. Be in this seeing — or BE this seeing?

I feel safe in this dialogue with you. I have many times had this seeing open in the safety and innocence of nature – only to have it vanish when I go to the grocery store after my hike.

Now the fear presses up into my throat, and I think about a long article, called 'Wrongness' I put on my website to do with the way all babies undergo training by means of Mom shaming them (but only about every nine minutes...) between nine months and two years old. Shaming? She turns away, her face goes cold, she says "NO!" or her heart and mind go cold and disapproving - the baby, pure openness, is profoundly affected. Tribal membership is being trained-in, and appropriately.

The research evidence for this is impeccable: missing, except in my article, is the speculation that it is this fierce enforcer of shame that propels the baby from being open seeing into being someone. The terrible twos bitterly express the conflict of this.

Shame has accompanied me all my life, although it was not until I started a postdoctoral program in psychology 15 years ago that someone was kind enough to point it out to me. When I got my doctorate, six years ago at 60 I was at the beginning of having the capacity to really notice the shame. 'Someone' has been very often a 'shamed someone.'

Now sorrow, heavy in my chest. Recent experiences in my own therapy in which the doorway back into childhood has the words "Danger!! Danger!!" over it.

I'm sorry if this is laborious to read – it is a response to your invitation. The shamed self — now abrupt shadowy contraction all the way through my viscera down into the core of my guts — is surely inevitable when something that does not actually exist is being forced into birth. The spiritual traditions have long retailed stories in which someone awakens to sight in the land of the blind (and is ignored or reviled...), but other than our tremendous conditionability, I don't think we have a really good explanation of why this mistaken identity is so viscerally and emotionally compelling. Shame completely fits the bill.

Do I have to sit in shame for the folds to get aired? I'm not making myself out in any way to be a Jesus figure, but wasn't he subjected to the most brutal extremity of shaming before he could cry out his doubt, and die once and for all to his old identity?

When I mentioned my 'awakening psychotherapy' project to the Tibetan Buddhist scholar and practitioner Ken McLeod, his lip curled in scorn, and he said "Why on earth would you want to put those two together?" So very different to your welcome, Sunil in your most recent posting.

Now thoughts about hara-kiri, the appropriate means of death for a noble-born Japanese swordsman amidst the shame of defeat: how shame freezes the deep viscera and makes us want to die on the spot.

Shame is universal, part of our biological heritage. And, shame is taboo, so all have it, all are shaped by it — and none are allowed to speak of it. So I would say shame is in the folds. As a very young child, four or five years old, lying in bed at night I would try to predict the next thought, and make myself infinitely tiny and infinitely large — my guess is that shame ("You are somebody! You are somebody!") gradually camouflaged the joyous open seeing, and is now the hidden source of the underlying fear you mention.

I don't really know how to go further at this point Sunil, although I think the 'LU approach' that I've read about would encourage simply feeling the shame, and all the deeply visceral discomfort of it. There is a certain quality of shame in talking about nobody being here, only seeing, even if Rumi says "Dissolve your whole body into vision: become seeing, seeing, seeing!" The complex knots, of the open innocence of this seeing, unborn — and how tricky it is when it is claimed by somebody who is aggrandized by the seeming possession of it.

And, this digging deep completely offers some kind of intuitively-joining linkage between the vertical immediacy of now and the horizontal flow of time. I'm not preoccupied by Jesus, but the symbol of every human being nailed upon the cross of this paradox seems inescapable to me. More than symbolic, however, is the sense that this digging deep is burrowing into the fact that these two are each other, and that wants to be revealed.

Thank you for reading, and for your care.

Hi Glenn
I'm glad I asked. I had a hunch that you wanted to say more. Wonderful airing. With your experience in psychology you may set me straight but we are on the same lambda. Recently one of the guides mused whether LU guides may still benefit from psychotherapy. My response was all psychotherapy is pointing the same thing as we are here. No psyche, no need for therapy.

I'm sure you are familiar with certain University offering pg studies on spiritual psychology. One of my friends is a graduate and now runs female goddess circles in Europe. It's that monkeys trading skills for paper again.

We carry many emotions like shame, fear, greed, lust etc
Patanjali calls them chitta vritti or mental affliction. Not to make light of your own feelings but he also calls them a great mistake, a phrase I shamelessly borrow.

Let's not get the big guys involved here although I agree we are all getting crucified for human sins, Jesus wasn't the only one. But it is only the bodies that suffer and succumb which is inevitable.

All mental affliction is entirely fictional as the one afflicted itself is fiction.

Do YOU see this without the help of big guns like Osho or Jesus?

How do you know it beyond the shadow of a doubt?

Post script

My apologies for keep hammering you with the same question in different words.

But as you say this is a wonderful exercise, socrates pointed it to us thousnads of years ago. I sometimes wonder why when wise words were spoken both by Buddha and many greek philosphers anout the same time, Buddhism has become so much more popular and widespread than platonic doctrine?

My guess is its not Buddha that made it happen but the human ears that recieved the message in Asia were more ready than western ears who were much more aggressive.

Here is a question for you? If everyone was suddenly enlightened would commerce and material progress cease?

Thanks Sunil,

I appreciate your kindness in letting me air -- and rant -- and accepting my whole shame spiel, all of which is based on the existence of someone, n'cest pas?

You asked "Do YOU see...that....all mental affliction is entirely fictional as the one afflicted itself is fiction?" No, I don't (if I have to give a black and white answer. You know my tendency to write wordy essays in response; I will spare you today.)

and

"How do you know it beyond the shadow of a doubt?" I don't. I only know there's no-one here in the very moment of now, of seeing. The doubt, or shadow of it, seems to/remain/s in the domain of an afflicted mental self.

Would commerce cease if all were enlightened? No, but I think it would take on a very different quality - perhaps a curious loving playfulness, at least, that has seemed to be the mindset of those who I've experienced who have moved on to that step of things.

Hammering is ok -- probably the best thing, seems to me. I seem to be up against it here.

Hi Glenn

First, is there anything that can be outside of direct experience?

Then what is shame in direct experience?

Is there anything you know beyond the shadow of a doubt?

There was one exercise we missed from my earlier post. It is time to do it.

Go back to a time or situation that may be unpleasant or even painful. And in honest looking, find out if it could be any different? Look deep.

I have to go at this a step at a time.

Direct experience of a thought of "I"? Yes. Direct experience of "I" implied by a thought of "I"? No; no such thing as "I", only a summary of experiences. So actuality of "I" would be outside direct experience, non-existent. There is no "I" in direct experience.

There's a non-cognitive element to shame - you can see the affect in babies very early in life, before there's any language or concepts. Sometimes I will blush and my gaze drop and my brain roil, before I know anything in thought: those will be in direct experience. Together, they constitute 'shame.' Is there de of shame? No, but there is of it's components.

Beyond a shadow of a doubt? This. Here. Now. Am (I stole that from Wei Wu Wei.) But 'know' in any cognitive sense? No. Know in an existential sense? THIS HERE NOW AM.

I'm sorry, but could you be more specific about the ex? 'Could' be any different? In imagination? During a prolonged awakening in my twenties I knew (ha! beyond a shadow of a doubt.....then) that not one trillionth of a fragment of even a single electron had ever been out of place in all eternity. NOTHING could be different! But today missed a session with a client, money down the drain, revisited the screwup/spaceout multiple times, pain each time -- but could it be different? NO!