Dear James, again you are interpreting. I am not negative. I forgot the question mark. Because we have to ask us exactly that. Are we just exchanging words? There is nothing wrong with what you wrote about perception. I never said anything else or objected that. But is this just an idea? Or is it something we actually do? If it is only an idea, we will not understand perception.
Yes, how do we find out? And how can we communicate with others about that in that limited way here? The communication here is just restricted to words. That is the advantage of a real meeting where we communicated in a “holostic” way, in the sense that we meet with our whole organism and expressions above words. There it is much easier to meet in a non-intellectual way. I agree with you that we can only find it out for ourself if something is true or not. We cannot find out if it is for the other true or not, no matter what he says. We simply will not know if it is an idea for the other or not. We can only find out for ourselves.
Dear James, I completely agree. And now I have a but: If we understand thinking we will see that it is absolutely capable of formulating that what you have written as an idea, making us believe that we actually have seen it, are aware and we decieve it again. Thinking has endless subtle ways to decieve us and with the focus on thinking in our society we learn an ever growing capacitiy to do that. That is why it is important to ask, if all this is just an idea? Or is this an actuality?
Let me add few things to clarify from which source cames this sentence of mine. I’m not trying to show off a special capacity of mine but just to point out a very simple thing that all of us can do. I need your trust for this.
Few years ago, in this forum I had an interesting conversation with another member about awareness, fear, and staying with fear without escaping. My interlocutor complained that fear and all the emotional reaction involved with it was something too strong to be tackled.
The conversation somehow gave me an hint and I decided to try and see if that hint was true. I don’t remember when and how it happened but one day I had a very strong perception of the now, of being really here. It’s impossible to describe it but it was not something “special” or mystical, but rather banal, simple, natural. This deep perception lasted nearly for the whole day, and I thought: "why had I never discovered this before? It’s so simple and easy. I think it has to do with the well-being of the body and a state of natural relaxation, but I’m not sure.
Usually I don’t force myself into meditation because I’ve found out it does not work. But during the following days I found it so ease and pleasant to sit and just remain with “what is”. Without doing any effort I found myself rooted in the now, in the present, with everything it contained. I enjoyed this perception like the taste of a food I liked. Then from there, from the now, I observed my emotions, desires, fears and I discovered that they had not such a strong grip on me like before. The perception of the now, and staying rooted in that state devaluated thought and emotions, took out their strenght, their grip and so I could stay with them wthout escaping. To make it short: I stayed with one particular fear for about ten minutes and the fear disappeared. I had tried that before a lot of times but it never worked because I was not rooted in the now.
So when I talked about “starting from the now” it was not an intellectual speculation but it came from experience.
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Read Voyager’s most recent post (number 247)…
He articulates it better than I have done.
But this would then be simply the error of taking as real something that is merely a pointer to what may or may not be real, right? The word is not the thing, the description is not the described.
So the words present tense awareness (for example) are simply words that may or may not refer to something actual. The discovery of what the words actually point to is up to each one of us to find out for ourselves.
But as Voyager describes, this isn’t some purely theoretical state we are discussing:
To simply sit and remain with our thoughts, feelings, sensations, etc, in simple present tense awareness, is something that anyone can do.
This is the crux of what we are inquiring into for me. And yes, my experience is also that in this present tense awareness thought is “devaluated”.
Thinking is just going on by itself, and has no intrinsic value beyond what it is actually doing (apart from the physical thinking that we obviously need to communicate, feed ourselves, etc, which we have already discussed).
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Isn’t this just “I” celebrating its improvement, its developing ability to diminish its opponent’s strength and power? When you say, “I could stay with them without escaping”, isn’t this the ego exulting in the reward it deserves for its diligence and determination?
I think now that “rooted” could not be the right word, I was just using an Italian expression, perhaps “grounded” is better. @James I need your linguistic help!
Of-course! 
Right, and it is not only that thought has no grip anymore on oneself, once whole acting changes. So if this is clear and not an idea, what are we discussing?
Dear Inquiry, (or inquisitor? )
I hope you were able to laugh at my wisecrack and so have a pleasant mood now…
Now to be serious (if you want to have a serious conversation):
Doubting is a good thing but when we doubt of everything it means we are in a labyrinth and are not able to see a way out.
If we want that a conversation led to a real communication, there must be reciprocal trust, like between two good friends. If I think you are a fraud or a misled dreamer then we will only be able to argue endlessly…
I cannot buy your trust, I cannot and I don’t want to prove anything. It’s up to you to “take it or leave it”. I might have deceived myself, or I might have invented everything. Both you and I cannot be sure. So what?
If you are travelling in a smooth highway then there is no sense in worrying about what I said or what K has said (hope you are smart enough to grasp the hint), it has actually no sense even staying here, in this forum, for so many years… but if you are in a labyrinth, then you must move to find a way out.
I don’t have the least idea!
“Rooted” works fine - it conveys perfectly well what you wanted to say. Roots also have to do with being grounded (like the roots of a tree), so it’s a nice metaphor to use: to be rooted in the now.
We are just touching on different facets of what it means to be aware, to be present, to inhabit the mundane actuality of the present, aren’t we? There may be nothing to discuss.
But I find myself interested in this topic. Awareness is both so natural, so ordinary, and yet so mysterious and essential to living a sane and full day (or a sane and full minute!!!).
I’m not interested in arguing about it or saying anything difficult - it’s just a sharing between friends who are interested, that’s all.
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.
And that’s anathema to you?
If I think you are a fraud or a misled dreamer then we will only be able to argue endlessly…
If the argument is worthwhile, why not?
If we want that a conversation led to a real communication, there must be reciprocal trust, like between two good friends.
Are you aware that this is just your opinion, or do you believe it is an unassailable truth?
I might have deceived myself, or I might have invented everything. Both you and I cannot be sure.
What if one is looking more closely than the other believes is possible? Wouldn’t that one have a better sense of what’s actually occurring than the one who has beliefs?
but if you are in a labyrinth, then you must move to find a way out.
What if you’re wrong about that? What if your belief that one must do something to be free is not only nothing new, but ancient foolishness wrapped up in the current fantasy?
And what are you interested in? Yes awareness might be as you said and much more. And then?
Anathema for me is seeing a human being like you wasting his life glued at a screen and typing idiocies (such as this question of yours) in the desperate attempt to have a fake relationship, the only kind of relationship is able to create. What prevents you to use your mental energies and resources to find something valuable in life? I told you more than once I’m not interested in this kind of discussion. If you have something sensate to say or to ask, you’ll find me here but not for wrong or useless questions.
Just for this time I’ll try to answer your questions the only way I think it’s worth.
I’ve already said why not: communication. Your reply shows your complete lack of interest in this human aspect.
It may be only an opinion of mine. You can find the answer to your question both in life and in this forum, it’s quite plain to see, if you are interested.
Of-course (this time I’m serious). So go ahead and look.
I said “if”, that means just a guess on my part and it implies the necessity to have a check on your part, otherwise you can never be sure of what you think you are in.
If my guess is wrong then it’s better so, and I’d be glad to see that you are not in that position. Not being able to know you in person I’ll have to assess where you are from what you say. Foolishness and fantasy are always behind the door, for anyone.
I realise that you (Inquiry) and Voyager have some history on the forum, but I’m not sure what the concrete issue is here?
As far as I can make out, Voyager shared a very simple, basic experience of what happened to him when he experimented one time with sitting down and being with “what is”; and by “what is” he just meant, among other things,
etc. And in this simple state of remaining with these things, he found that
As Voyager prefaced, this was
So he wasn’t making a claim to some superior insight or specialness that only Voyager has attained; but he was sharing a simple observation of what took place one time when he sat with his immediate experience of things - something that anyone can do.
You (Inquiry) replied to this asking Voyager whether the sharing of this involved some kind of egotism. You wrote:
Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. From an outsider’s perspective, who knows? But even if there was ego involvement in the sharing of the experience, how material is this to the actual observation itself? Doesn’t the observation itself have some usefulness for us (i.e. for those of us interested in exploring what happens when we are aware?).
I think it was in relationship to this that Voyager later replied
No-one is saying that doubt is not important to inquiry. We must be free to doubt everything, to doubt our conclusions, to doubt our experiences, to doubt what other people have said.
But it is also pretty clear that doubt itself can be completely self-defeating when it isn’t used with common sense. To doubt everything all the time leads only to perpetual dead ends, which stultifies inquiry, blocks all real exploration. As K sometimes said, doubt must be kept “on a leash” (like a dog). Sometimes it is good to let the dog off the leash to run around, explore the whole park. But one cannot simply leave the dog to run wild, because it would become a nuisance to others, and a danger to itself (dogs are generally not very astute judges of the danger posed by passing cars).
So doubt has its place, but one must recognise that doubt too can be deployed in the services of egotism - so it is important to be aware of the danger of becoming habituated to doubt (which at its worst becomes mere cynicism).
Now the point is, for most of us (I’m guessing Voyager too) much of our lives are spent living in and operating from the mental space of thinking. So the inquiry here is whether this mental space of thinking is the only space there is (the assertion that it is the only space maybe your view, Inquiry); or whether there is a completely natural space of perceiving, listening, sensing, awareness, that we all can have access to without needing to be superhumans!
I think there is. So when Voyager refers to the idea of being
I take him to be referring to the fact that this labyrinth is the mental space of thinking/reacting, etc. It seems to me to be a fact that there is no way out of the labyrinth of the mental space (of thinking, reacting, etc) from within that thinking. You may disagree with this, but I honestly think it is a fact - so long, that is, that one is not aware of the existence of any other space.
So what is this other space (apart from thinking/reacting)? Honestly, I think it is just too damn obvious and humble for most people to really take seriously. It is just the split-second that follows our perception of anything visual or auditory (or olfactory or sensate) in our immediate environment.
Even you, Inquiry, as a biological organism, make momentary space within your consciousness of the world for seeing and hearing, smelling and tasting and touching. If you didn’t, you would already be dead or in a coma. Which means that you have never truly paid attention to these matters (not just you of course, but almost all of us - myself included!).
So when, for instance, Erik asks,
to me there is no “and then”. There is only the exploration and experimentation with awareness - because this is the one thing we seem to completely disvalue, overlook, get bored with, pass over as being commonplace, insignificant, not useful, not constructive.
But for me, our whole life is there. ‘Spirituality’ - as such - might be defined as:
- the space between our perception of anything,
and
- the mental commentary, labelling, judgements of like and dislike (the mental ‘shit-posting’!) that immediately (or almost immediately) intervenes and takes over the perception.
What happens in that space - which, as already said, may only be a split-second - is all the ‘spirituality’ we need to aspire to.
And if we find that we cannot slow down sufficiently to become aware of that moment when only the perception of the thing exists (the colour of the rose, the sound of a bird, of an aeroplane overhead, of the wind in the trees, the clank of workmen putting up scaffolding, the bark of a dog, etc), then we can be aware of the moment when our mind begins to label things (when the ‘shit-posting’ begins!).
If one doubts this, then is that doubt anything more than a mental reaction, a mental labelling of what is happening? A mental reaction is like the dog barking: it is food for our perception, for our awareness.
So ‘shit-posting’ (sorry to repeat the ugly word!) is just a monastery bell calling us to be silent and listen to the new ‘shit’ the mind is presently throwing at its perceptions! If our ‘spirituality’ never moves beyond this, then nothing essential has been lost. We are then monks and nuns of this incessant noise of mental space, bringing to it our attention, our curiosity, our patience and concern.
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One of the things that interests me about awareness is that it is already one step ahead of us, no matter what we do. Our minds have already let the world in, before we are are aware that this is what has happened.
So, for instance, everything that we will ever be aware of is already happening before we become aware of it:
- the thoughts we are thinking, the feelings that we feel, the sensations that we sense;
- the bark of the dog, the sound of the mower mowing, the tweet of the bird, the touch of the wind on our skin,
is all taking place before we become aware of them.
It’s as though our awareness merely catches up with itself (because sensation, feeling, sound, etc are already forms of awareness themselves!). And to really catch up with what is happening in awareness, our awareness needs to be completely in sync with what is going on. Which means we have to be completely present, completely here, completely now (which we can be - so far as our sensory perceptions are concerned).
All this may sound obvious and mundane, but I find it genuinely fascinating.
We can’t be and we aren’t. But we can be present as much as possible. For me, for many years now the ‘truth’ has been is that what we are IS awareness’. Awareness isn’t ‘personal’, it is in everything and everything is in it.
As if he was in the court of law being prosecuted!!
Well said.
But there is more than one meaning that “labirinth” has in regarding to @Inquiry. I used this word in the context of the trust being functional to a real communication. As I said a certain amount of doubt and even of skepticism is necessary when you have to explore a new environment and deal with strangers, but being totally skeptical at a first approach, without specifying the reasons why a post made you doubt is equivalent to assault an enemy and treat him like a faker, while when one is really interested to find out whether what has been said could be true or not, a certain amount of initial trust must be granted so that truth can come out of a friendly and reasonable discussion. The second meaning is that one has always (or almost always) the possibility to see if someone is reporting a bogus story or the product of immagination. Your analysis of my text proves this point. So if one has such an inital cathegorical approach to a post like mine it could only means that: 1) one has not read the text with sufficient attention and interest, 2) The only purpose for replying is to attack that person, 3) One is completely blind to something so obvious and simple and has therefore no possibility to have the least idea of its credibility.
In talking about “labirinth” I chose the third possibility, i.e. one is shut up in a labirinth, in the dark regarding the understanding of my post. Then there is the third meaning or methaphor: according to my view Inquiry is prisoner in the labirinth of this forum, addicted to it, slave of his inner urges and habits, and even unaware of the reasons why he is stuck to this forum for so many years. I have asked him many times: Why are you here? He never replied. It was not a question which could give him the possibility to show his intellectual talent…
But if you read attentively Inquiry’s reply to me:
He is referring to the image of the labirinth which is found in some traditional (both in the east and west) spiritual doctrines. We have an erudite here James, and he never miss a chance to show his erudition.
This habit of his to always dwell in high spheres and in the intellectual field prevented him to grasp the more, down to earth, practical meaning of a labirinth.