Underwater

I breathe normally, but I feel like I’m underwater. At work, at home, in bed, I’m never on the surface, but just below it. It’s like I’ve been holding my breath for 39 years, staring at life through a liquid-air interface. I want to breathe out and in again. I’m out of my element.

I’m always in my own way. I cannot pass myself. Everywhere I look “I” block the view. We fit in the same space. We are like opposites sides of thin sheet of paper. Who is this person who won’t leave me alone? Or maybe it’s me who won’t let him go.

Something is wrong. Everything is wrong. Can we retreat from untruth when everything is untrue? No, we can only simplify the lie…and hope that between the lie and the not-knowing there is a letting go.

Trying to prolong focus from retreat

This week was very good. Following last weekend there was a desire to prolong the focus of the retreat rather than return to the rut of net-surfing and procrastination.

It seemed like the retreat raised my level of honesty – both mental truth and verbal truth – and so my intuition was well tuned too, but has dulled over the week. But this dulling of intuition/honesty/inspiration seems to have been slowed by some choices for tension and continuance of the spirit of the retreat over dissipation of it. For instance despite persistent and nagging desire to go into a restaurant I made a deal to hold off until after the weekend PSI meeting and kept it. And with temptation to watch a movie when exercising there was a sense it would dissipate intensity, and a debate continued for a while before I thought to try asking “Why?” Asking why opened my mind to sit and see if a better solution could be found to the boredom of stationary bike riding, and catching up on e-mails came out as a great one.

Listening to zen podcasts and Rose lectures, several days I came home from work eager to meditate rather than have down-time and many meditations were good. Of my two problems more meditations were on the angst. I am sensing it is a leap beyond my honest toolset from, the answer is to challenge assumptions, to, the assumption to challenge is my self-definition. At the PSI meeting Saturday however, Art pointed out I am afraid to admit to myself I don’t know what I am which is true – I can’t respond to this question internally when it is posed.

But Art also came back to the point that while I’ve narrowed to two problems I see my mind work on, there’s still one primary. In my case, my mind is much more engaged with the problem of threat than the problem of angst. My thought is the former is not deep enough for multiple ulterior reasons – yet that thought keeps me stuck and I sense a focus that is possible were I to take the threat issue seriously that would blast away the problem so quickly. The 3 ways I thought of to fight threat are, confidence, facing fears and introspection, and Art pointed out these are on the level of experience – the 4th, the most obvious, is to inquire into who is threatened. Maybe. Both meditations since were bad, though.

This coming week with the temptations to go to a restaurant or watch a documentary when excercising I’d like to keep asking why? – because it’s a very good question.

A retreat helps in decent follow up to last week

Shawn Nevins’ retreat seems to have very much re-inspired me – not energized, but clarified the way again and made my search my priority again. The threat to this inspiration lasting seems to be all those daily influences on thoughts.

Highlights were: deciding that starting a group is my next step, and awesome clarity in and after meditating today. Also, a group rapport on Saturday night starting when Paul C. mentioned seeing nothing, was so strongly inward for me, I was watching the mind react with 80% detachment vs. the regular 2% detachment. I could see then attachment to reactions is clearly my regular state. Even now, it is identification with the creator vs. clarity I am not the creator of thoughts. How can I maintain the effect of this retreat’s influence? Oh yes, I also noticed today that I do want to be in a rural ashram – the chance to focus on this as much as possible – to have a laboratory or factory for enlightenment or be in a space designed, gutted on the influences level to facilitate and encourage that – that that is even the principle behind the decisions – a rural ashram has an opportunity to take it yet, yet further than an urban ashram.

In that rapport after the sessions I also got back to seeing 2 awarenesses.

Yeah, of course to reread my weekend’s notes would be good. How can I get more useful influences and remember?
1. listen to taped Rose lectures at work

A Beginning

Who am I? Why am I? Where am I going when I die? 

These are the questions that we, sooner or later, have to face. The first time they arise, we may be surprised and, at first, confused. ‘Why are these questions relevant?’ we  ask. But as the feeling in us grows that something is not right about our lives as they currently stand, we find that the questions attack us incessantly. 

Who am I?

                                                       Who am I?

                                                                                                                     Who am I?

Our ‘normal’ friends cannot help us, our parents may think we are slightly cooky, and yet we find we have no choice but to search. We may put the search off for some time, we may avoid The Work, but we can never cut it out completely. We can never stop the yearning.

At least that’s true in my case.

This blog will be a log of sorts. I’ll post here from time to time giving updates on my search. The hope is that this blog may be of assistance to others who are interested in this search for Self-Definition or The Truth or Freedom or whatever. I’m convinced that, ultimately, nothing is more important than finding Who We Are, that nothing else will cure the existential angst or satisfy the yearning for completeness.

So, welcome to this blog, I hope you find this helpful.

Until next time

A very good week, finally

At Monday’s PSI meeting Art suggested writing and talking about what I want, to get it out and get past my self-editing causing writer’s block on that question. As a result of progress doing that, I wanted to meditate several times, reenergized by relevant-feeling topics.

Also, I tried two tricks this week. 1: accepting fewer extra hours at my part-time job because planning my free time last week showed two meditations are mathematically impossible the way I was going, and, 2: reading a few pages of Santanelli before work to encourage more watching during the day – a part of my strategy for my 2009 goal. The first trick worked, though I did still miss three meditations. The second trick wasn’t tested since I only read before work once. In fact, there isn’t much interest in doing things in my strategy, but I think if I don’t I’ll come to regret that as the end of the year gets close.

Vince Lepedi’s Self-Definition: The Only Real Problem brought procrastinating with preliminary problems back into focus. It struck me as written for me. Worth mentioning too is a close call with celibacy where there was a debate whether to stick to it or not (as always goes) and from somewhere there was enough will to pray and I did get past it.

But, Saturday’s PSI meeting is the highlight. A combination of the week’s effort in one direction (i.e. “What do I want?”), an effort at honesty in the meeting, and confrontation not reinforcement, is what may have broken me out of stuckness of the last couple months. I can see 2 questions/problems I want to answer: one is the frequent to constant feeling of threat, the other is the various forms of emptiness and incompleteness. If I had to pick only one to answer it’d be the latter, but I think I can answer both.

I have also ventured into self-questioning more sincerely than ever before because those two problems may not – to can’t – be solved by adding anything in experience, nor by ignoring them, thus questioning their assumptions is the possible direction left that I see. Of course, I’m still in a hurry to jump to self-definition work so there may still be connections to make to there.

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