• Pondering

    April 11, 2018

    You have recently talked about pondering as a three-centered activity requiring conscious energy. What do you mean by this?

    Ordinarily, we are not able to engage in three-centered activity. The body is automatically moving and adopting gestures and postures while the mind is home to a chattering thinker whose content is habitual and associative. These two tracks are only related to the extent that the activity on one can cause reverberations in the other. I have a passing thought of something unpleasant and my body contracts in a predictable way. I sense being cold or tired and my thinking adopts a loop of negative self-talk. Otherwise, I am a house divided against itself, thinking one thing while doing another.

    In my ordinary state, I am not aware of the content of my experience except in the most general way, and intermittently at that. This is evidence of a low energy state. In fact, both centers…thinking and sensing…are operating on what we can call automatic energy which is sufficient only to power habitual actions. Most of the time, I am not even aware that I am immersed in trivial, useless thinking. I can walk home form the supermarket without knowing it and suddenly ‘come to my senses’ when I mysteriously find myself at home. Of the feeling center, which we call the heart, there is not a trace.

    Obviously, pondering is not possible in this state. Even sustained thinking along the same line is not possible without frequently forgetting and losing the track, mostly arising from the interruptions of thought associations or random sensations.

    There is a second, higher level of energy which is possible for the thinking and sensing centers which we can call sensitive energy. This is what we mean when we say that we have ‘come to our senses’. This energy enables me to be aware of my sensations and thoughts on a more or less continuous basis, while the energy lasts. I am sensitive to my environment. I am aware of my reactions and those of others. I am able to order my thoughts based on my wish to communicate. However, I’m not able to be aware of sensations and thoughts simultaneously. I still do not have access to feelings but I notice my emotional likes and dislikes as they occur…a kind of similitude of feeling.

    There is a third level of energy, called conscious energy, which opens up another realm of experience. When conscious energy is present, the heart can operate. Feelings can be accessed. Also, this is the energy of multi-tasking. Now I can think and sense and feel simultaneously and these three functions can be co-ordinated. When they co-operate, they re-enforce each other. The natural result is a state of ecstatic pleasure.

    Three-centered being is living in an Imaginarium. Thoughts, sensations and feelings are real experiences…more real than ordinary physical reality. Contemplate a whale and you are a whale, a bird and you experience flight.

    I am not telling you all this to fill your heads with more theory. These three energies are directly observable as they operate in you. Knowing this makes it more possible to shift your state.

    Is it possible to access conscious energy intentionally?

    Yes, but intention is not the only way. The universe may present you with shocks to waken you…shocks of distress as well as shocks of beauty and grace that trigger being-attention and offer you higher energies. Accept them. Use them.

    One of the great laws of alchemy says that the higher interacts with the lower to create the middle. The higher is being-attention. The lower is sensitive energy. Attention is the catalyst which digests the sensitive, transforming it to create the conscious.

    Invoke attention. Allow it to take hold of whole body sensation as a kind of food offering. As conscious energy arises, the process gains momentum and effortlessly continues itself without the intervention of a thinker. This is an example of the second wind of attention. In this way, become more conscious.

    Then what? Then you may see what is possible for a human being.

    What is being-attention?

    Attention that is not funnelled through the head brain, not intermediated by the thinker…attention by which the universe beholds you. Find out. Inquire into the nature of attention. You may find that you are not the source of attention, not its center, but the object of a greater attention that calls you to be.

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  • Falling Asleep

    April 4, 2018

    I know that I must have walked home from the supermarket because I find myself at home with the groceries but I can’t remember how I got there…I was obviously lost in my thinking.

    Is it possible for you to notice the process of falling out of observing self and falling into identification with the thinker? As it happens? Can we do this now, as we are listening, thinking and speaking to each other?

    Yes. This seems to be possible. Observing self, there is a sense of experiencing what is happening inside me but then I become the thinker and I do not have this experience. Everything is on the surface. Also, as the thinker or the one who is speaking, I am contracted. Attention narrows down to my thinking and I have very little sense of what is happening around me.

    It is very important for you to notice this narrowing of your experience as it occurs. It is a real experience, fully sensible, not just a concept. If you know it in this way, you can do something about it.

    When you have become the thinker, does it seem that thinking is taking up all the attention? Can this narrowing be prevented or reversed? Is it possible to have thinking without becoming the thinker? What is required?

    I guess it would be helpful to remain aware of sensations.

    Yes. As you sense yourself falling into being the thinker or the speaker, you could grab onto other sensations. Perhaps you could continue to look at the person you are speaking to. Perhaps, while you are thinking, you could continue to ‘see’ the line of your thought, the logic of it and its resonance in your body, perhaps even the feeling of it; these experiences anchor attention outside the thinking process. Perception is an antidote for identification.

    What is needed is voluntary attention. Falling into identifying as the thinker is involuntary attention, which we call sleep. That’s how people in our culture fall into ambulant sleep…they identify with their thinking. They think they are the little voice in their head.

    How does this relate to pondering?

    This is an interesting question. Did you just come across this term accidentally? Pondering is a technical term in this work. It means a three–centered questioning or consideration of an issue. The issue is simultaneously penetrated by sensing, thinking and feeling. This is quite different from our usual thinking which moves mechanically from one thought to another by association rather than staying on one point. Pondering is not possible if I am identified with the thinker. There is not enough attention and not enough space.

    Pondering in this sense is real thinking. It requires voluntary split attention and a different level of energy from the lazy, associative, reactive mental process we refer to as thinking.

    Not falling into thinking requires intention, does it not?

    It can arise from intention but if I have to depend upon my intention to access voluntary attention it will not happen very often. Many things around me can call me to be voluntary…my conversation with you, my wish to eat, my need to get to work on time. These demands could engage a conscious response…they are rich in sensations… if I do not continually fall asleep. What is critical is to notice that I am continually falling asleep. I need to know this process intimately. When I do, perhaps I can use the events of the world around me to be awake.

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