Meanwhile could you explain more about "attention focuses more readily on where there is nothing?"
Yes, here are two examples:
At the beginning of this process, I kept getting caught up in speculations about how the “communication I” functions (I was a social scientist: plenty of theories to work with!). And when Behzad told me to look, I kept seeing thoughts, sensations, feelings, labels, etc. constantly merging, reacting, emerging out of each other—the unpredictable ripples on the waves of an enormous ocean. I resisted what I felt as the pressure to say they came from “nowhere”—thinking that the enormous complexity and unpredictability of these ripples was, for all intents and purposes, as good as nowhere.
Then on July 4 you wrote, “it’s all just aspects of the same always changing Thing.” You may remember that I had the impulse to disagree, even though I really liked the way you said it. We may even have different understandings of what you wrote, but I realized that it doesn’t matter. Why keep looking at the mechanics of how thoughts work, when the point is to look past the labels? If I keep looking at the mechanics, I will always see “me” as this complicated and elusive thing—rather than just looking directly and seeing that it’s complicated and elusive because it is not there!
And then last night I read the last couple of dialogs in
Gatecrashers. Feelings of envy, competition, embarrassment, superiority, skepticism, etc. emerged as I read. So I followed those feelings, and the first place I went was into stories about my childhood, my need to be unique, how I have defined my uniqueness, etc. I was creating all kinds of stories about my particular patterns and conditioning.
I saw what was happening and stepped back, read a bit more and tried to note only the original raw feelings in my body. I felt vibrations and tensions in my body. I saw that as soon as I tried to analyze those feelings, I got a label like “envy.” Those labelled emotions did not have have the “me” label directly attached, but seemed to imply “me”. Then as soon as I followed that implication, I went right into the stories and “deeper” causes, and it was me, Me, me, me, I, Me, Me, me all the way down.
So back to the question about “attention focuses on where there is nothing”: A couple of weeks ago, I might have followed these stories out for 10 minutes or more, with endless reiterations. Last night, they dropped away pretty easily—once I saw what was happening there was no more than half second of “wait, wait, let’s just follow this one thought out to its conclusion” and then it was gone. And attention back to “What the heck was that ‘me’ riding on the back of all of those stories?” And instead of theorizing how those me’s got there, I saw that they were only thoughts and didn’t worry about them.
Despite all this, something still feels elusive as I've mentioned in past posts. And the same feelings still pop up when I read
Gatecrashers.
So, another long-winded post. Thanks for all your patience, Pablo.
