Bubbles Bursting

Listening to podcasts at work has been great. Whether or not the speaker is really enlightened doesn’t matter too much because I turn the volume down, so while working on the computer, I may hear “everything is perfect exactly as it is” or “sentient beings” or an Asian name like “Genzo” that stimulates thinking. Less logical lectures are better so I don’t have to follow them.

Highlight was meeting in Baltimore with three other friends on the path. We sat, talked and confronted each other for three hours. The restaurant kicked us out at closing time and we stood outside for a while, some of it in silence.

Had a celibacy accident. As the weather warms up the value of mental celibacy gets forgotten.

It keeps striking me looking at the mind is like looking at an eyeball in the mirror.

It’s not really what’s alive. This isn’t as disturbing as it would be if I hadn’t been looking for it… but should be. I saw a corner of truth that would have shaken up my beliefs in the past and made it’s truth value a must-know. But I think since I knew I was looking for this it has had some muted effect.

Some media and some confrontation

Watching Spielberg’s “Empire of the Sun” affected me pretty strongly on Thursday and Friday. I felt overwhelming poignacy and it left a sense the mind is a joke, essentially a lie. Also listened to a couple podcasts that got me thinking: What happens when you don’t use intuition? You get ghost stories on your show like #2 in Anything Ghost podcast #80. This series is otherwise thought stimulating, so far. Also, in a success-book-highlights podcast Philosopher’s Notes, in an episode called “The Secret of Happiness” the question raised is: What do you love? And, what percent of your life do you dedicate to it? My answer was, truth and friendships (esp. on the path) and 10% and less than 1%.

The Saturday PSI meeting and meditation left me in a spot of high tension. In life there are things I both want and fear and watching such a “perfect” conflict (as Art put it) leads me to feel it really is a terrible experience and I want transcendence or death. He also pointed out within threat is I will get thrown back into the void, and so I’m fearing the void/death. When I am meditating on being on my deathbed, however, the songs of only life lose their value because I want to know about life and death now. To really know death I need to die, so I am trying to bring my mind to that point and beyond.

Maybe I’m on the path

This week I missed a lot of meditations, and when meditating I’d feel no energy, no desire, and just wait for the time to be up. Many meditations were also while driving or walking, few of those ever being good for me.

The brightest spots came listening to early Rose lectures at work. Best was a recording of his The Path lecture. It seems like I’m understanding what he’s trying to point at better than three years ago. This feeling doesn’t come with a sense I’m definitely right, in fact it has a lot of doubt, e.g. how could it be that simple – I thought this was mysticism, where’s the un-understandable transcendence? I know I could be way off, but maybe I’m right.
Also on Monday I want to Ben’s PSI meeting and one question in the vein of what do you know for sure led me to sense I need the mind to stop to see myself.

I did pass on movie watching and restaurant going but worked very late two days and spent my weekend with family, so lost any prioritization effect. With family, I did spend time with kids following advice to become like a little child. After no weekend meditations, I felt a desire for a good meditation on my trip home, but didn’t stop and wait for it to possibly happen.

This coming week, I’d like to continue to manage my influences and allow inspiration and clarity to carry over into most meditating.

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 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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