• Isolation

    June 26, 2016

    I think that one of the greatest challenges we face in our lives is isolation. What does this work say about isolation?

    First, can you explore the sensations of isolation? Can you inquire into the state objectively?

    It would be easy to think that isolation means not having contact with other people and that the solution is to have contact with others. But if you explore the state objectively, you may find that isolation is not about the need for others. It’s about you.

    When I experience isolation, I am focused on myself. I am thinking about myself. I am not sensing my environment. I am not able to access feeling. My isolation is self-created, it’s identification with an aspect of self, a psychological state characterized by self-absorption.

    To feel isolated is to be disconnected. Disconnected from what? Perhaps attention? Can you shift attention?

    Consider this. Isolation is personal. To exit isolation, exit the personal.

    Impartial attention exists in all places and times. It instantly connects all that it touches. It is the matrix of unity.

    Partial attention, attention appropriated by the head brain, funneled through the narrow portal of the personality, focused on self, reinforces separateness. Do not take attention into the person…step out into the greater field of attention.

    It is the impersonal, the formless, the abstract, the metaphysical, that removes isolation. See what happens when you enter presence. Is it possible to be a uniquely existing exactness without having boundaries? That is what presence is, that’s what it is to be unidentified. No boundaries.

    The abstract is the glue that permeates and holds everything in relationship. It is the universal origin of all apparent individuations.

    Related Post:

    The Abstract – Mar 14, 2016

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  • The Abstract (2)

    March 19, 2016

    Last week you defined the abstract as a quality or characteristic apart from any specific object or instance. You also asked us to experience the abstract. I have not had any success at this. Can you give us a more practical example to work with?

    I ask you to clean up your work space here at the gallery. You do so. The space becomes more ordered. Perhaps it is not the way I would order it but I recognize that it now has order. Where does this come from? Why are we able to agree that order has increased, even if the specific configuration would be different if any one of us did the ordering? Can you experience this quality of order directly, without reference to a particular?

    Order is a manifestation of the abstract, an expression of an abstract quality. For most human beings of sound mind, it gives rise to a sensation of satisfaction. The impulse to order, or to be honest, or loving, begins in the unseen world—it is a priori as the philosophers once said. We are able to cognize these qualities because they already exist. Exist where? I would say that order exists within the capacity of perceiving. But perhaps more exactly, all the qualities of the abstract exist as the latent possibilities of empty space and they take form through the action of perceiving.

    This formulation seems to suggest that the world around us is an illusion, that what we experience is not real but just a function of our perception.

    Yes and no. What you experience is always real and it is always an illusion. The fish in the fish tank very likely does not know it is in a tank. The experience of the fish is the experience of the fish. But as the owner of the fish, standing outside the tank, you know something about the reality of the fish’s life that the fish does not know. You are able to see a larger context in which it is clear that the fish lives in an illusion. But the fish has real experience nonetheless–its life is not made less because you know its limitations. Moreover, the fish’s life has a specificity of experience that you, outside the tank, cannot really know.

    The universe is much greater than the universe I perceive. I know this by reasoning from the example of the fish tank. Can I learn to perceive more? Or more correctly, can I learn to limit my perceiving less? To me, the answer may be found in the experience of the abstract, the unlimited.

    Rumi refers to the abstract as the Sea, which he also calls the unlimited Treasury of the Unseen. Each of us is given a tray with samples from this Sea. These samples are what we are able to experience in this world but they are only a small portion of what is to be found in unlimited measure in the Treasury. The samples are extraordinarily beautiful but they are limited. Some of us long for the Treasury. As Rumi says, “The longer one stays upon the Sea, the colder one’s heart grows for the tray.”

    The items on the tray do not become less beautiful. They are simply no longer sufficient. Attachment to the specific is lessened by attraction to the Source. That is the power of the abstract.

    Related Posts:

    The Abstract – Mar 14, 2016

    Perception – Sept 5, 2015

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  • The Abstract

    March 14, 2016

    Yesterday, you asked us if we could “listen to space, not the sounds within space but space itself”. I had no idea what you were talking about but, oddly enough, when I tried to do it, my state underwent a major shift in a way I can’t describe.

    You encountered the abstract. You had an engagement with the formless.

    What do you mean by abstract?

    The abstract is a quality or characteristic apart from any specific object or instance. In common usage, it refers to a concept or idea, something with no specific physical existence like, say, justice. But I am not asking you to indulge in conceptualism, which is already one of your favourite past-times. I am asking you to experience the abstract, the abstract beyond thought, and it seems that you did, at least for a moment.

    Is it possible to experience something that has no existence in time and space?

    Our most important experiences such as feeling, attention and presence, are formless; they do not exist in the ordinary way. They do not occupy time and space. Our work places considerable emphasis on observation of gesture and the extraordinary power of sensation, experiences which do occur in time and space. Factual experience is a necessary anchor for attention and presence. But transformation also requires engagement with the abstract.

    Our habit is to tie the abstract to a specific. We have feeling but the feeling is associated with something or someone. The specific then takes over through the power of attachment and the abstract is lost. The specific is extraordinarily valuable itself and it can also suggest or invoke the abstract. They are not enemies but they are also not the same. A feeling needs no object, no attachment, no reason to exist; in its essence, it is universal. Even more so, the capacity for feeling does not need a specific feeling; the capacity in itself is an extraordinary reality and to experience it is nameless ecstasy.

    Presence is existence without identity. Existence as what? Find out. Is it the miracle of being? And does it not bring with it a quality of joy and an experience of exactness without any exact thing? This is difficult to grasp and even harder to express in thought. I apologize for being obscure. All I can do is point and suggest that you work with this.

    To listen to space is to direct attention to the formless. Does space have sound? If sound is a physical vibration in time and space, space makes no sound we can hear. If space is not an absence but rather an active medium for presence and attention, perhaps space can be heard. One form of hearing is the attention acting through the ears. Another form of hearing is with attention acting directly but with the same quality or setting as listening with the ears. You may find that the abstract is musical, that it vibrates at another level as the music of the spheres.

    Can you see not only what you see but also see that you are seeing? Can attention attend to itself? These are ways to remove the mesmerizing power of the specific for an engagement with the abstract. They are somersaults into the unknown. The universal is embraced and the personal is overturned.

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