realizing selflessness

[whoknows]

Re: reactions to correction:
The first three students who took an online quiz I created all emailed me to tell me that the correct answer for question #1 got marked as incorrect.
(I’ve made it clear that I’m very grateful to be told if anything on the site for my online course doesn’t work right or is unclear.)
Felt a little embarrassed. Fixed the issue. Emailed all three back to apologize, thank them, and tell them it was fixed.
No big deal.
Apparently, it was such a small deal that it only belatedly occurred to me that it’s an example of something you and I have been talking about.

[vinceschubert]

but it still feels a lot of the time like “I” am thinking a thought—i.e., that there’s an “I” who had some control over it

It’s time to leave kindergarten.

The feeling “I am thinking this” may continue to appear. It doesn’t reopen the case. You’ve looked in the fridge often enough. There is no watermelon.

Rest in that knowing—not as a conclusion that must be defended, but as permission to stop searching.

Questions may still appear, but they needn’t become assignments. They can be held lightly, turned over, laughed at and allowed to remain unanswered. Curiosity replaces urgency. Inquiry becomes play rather than a hunt for the missing piece.

If an old identification brings suffering, curiosity may wander over and have a look. Perhaps something loosens; perhaps it returns later. No final explanation is required. The conditions are too numerous, their effects too mysterious, and every experience is already changing the organism in ways that cannot be measured.

Gradually, this may become ordinary: nothing to find, nothing to finish, questions without demanded answers, and enough good humour to let uncertainty breathe.

Then experience is no longer flattened by the constant need to explain, improve or escape it. The familiar becomes strange again. Light on a wall, a passing thought, rabbits on an abandoned runway—each is allowed its impossible existence.

Not an answer.

Wonder-full-ness.

much love ❤️

v

[whoknows]

but it still feels a lot of the time like “I” am thinking a thought—i.e., that there’s an “I” who had some control over it

It’s time to leave kindergarten.

Pfthfth! (That’s me blowing raspberries at you—y’know, in a very mature way.)

The feeling “I am thinking this” may continue to appear. It doesn’t reopen the case. You’ve looked in the fridge often enough. There is no watermelon.

I know! That was not the issue.
I just thought it might be helpful to have more of a felt sense of it.

Rest in that knowing—not as a conclusion that must be defended, but as permission to stop searching.

Questions may still appear, but they needn’t become assignments. They can be held lightly, turned over, laughed at and allowed to remain unanswered. Curiosity replaces urgency. Inquiry becomes play rather than a hunt for the missing piece.

Wonder-full-ness.

Yeah, OK, “permission to stop searching” sounds good.
So does curiosity rather than urgency.
So does “wonder-full-ness.”

I will let go of TRYing to experience thoughts as not being produced by the thinker.

* * * * *

This morning, I surprised myself by doing a bunch of work that could’ve waited until sometime next week but which was nice to get out of the way.

I am inclined to attribute this to spending more of my time hanging out in “boundless consciousness.” I’d like a better phrase for that, but Angelo’s will do for now, and its unfamiliarity and oddity are actually helpful when I want to remind myself to settle into what is a somewhat new flavor of open awareness for me, which involves being less caught up in thoughts and more aware of sense perceptions, with a sense that being aware of sense perceptions is simply the natural state, accompanied by a gentle sense of being aware of being aware. That description made it sound complicated, but it doesn't feel complicated. It feels like just being here.

I’ve noticed before, starting almost forty years ago (and spouse just confirmed that he’s noticed this too), that more meditation time generally seems to make it easier to take care of one’s responsibilities. I could speculate about mechanisms for that, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn’t come up with a fully satisfying explanation. And I don’t need one.

* * * * *

[I wrote this up yesterday but couldn’t bring myself to post anything else before you posted again:]

From an Angelo video, “What to Do When You Experience Unbound Consciousness.”:
“Once you come to this place, there’s nothing more you can do. You can give yourself to this experience of pure conscious experience, pure conscious being, and remain alert, remain in that thoughtless space. But there’s nothing more you can do. The rest is out of your hands.” “It’s just a matter of time.”
And he notes that there might be a fear barrier. He basically says: Disregard the thoughts, stay there, and it’ll subside.

This all sounds right to me.

* * * * *

I’ve been noticing in the last day or two that when my attention unclenches from the thoughts it had grabbed onto, often my face also unclenches, around the eyes, mouth, and jaw.