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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