• Work Notes: Curating Personal Experience

    May 27, 2024

    We run on energy. Our primary source of energy is sensation. Without sensation we die. We are sensing creatures, beings with bodies.

    The five externally triggered physical sensations of seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting (really at least seven with the sensations of movement and location in space) are neutral in their normal functioning. There is another set of sensations which are internally generated reactions to external phenomena, ranging from euphoria to irritation, anger to depression. These we call emotions.

    Our ordinary emotions are sensations with a gloss of associated thinking. The sensations are valuable as energy, information and motive to act. They are precious. More so than the thoughts by which they are named.

    Our emotions and their underlying sensations need to be curated so that they are food for our own evolution and not hijacked and used by others, human or not, to involve us in external or reciprocal feeding. To that end, we need to be able to see our emotions unfold in real time, tracking not so much the associated thinking but mostly the sensations.

    If followed by impartial attention, emotions are digested and transformed into conscious energy, leaving no ugly residue for wasteful reverberations. This is difficult to do and requires much practice. The secret is that attention is a catalyst that enables the transformation of sensitive energy to conscious energy, and like all catalysts, attention itself is not changed.

    You may ask…what is conscious energy? That’s a discussion for another day.

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  • Work Notes: How We Serve

    May 16, 2024

    How do we serve the lesser gods? We feed them. What is their food? Our sensations of anger, hatred, jealousy, frustration, obsessive desire. These sensations are held in the nervous system and the muscles and their vibration attracts unseen minions who revel in them, encourage them and look for ways to provoke them. In our work, these sensations are known as negative emotions because they arise as an electrical charge in the nervous system and eventually discharge.

    Religions have developed rules to subdue the expression of these negative emotions but rules most often operate on the basis of suppression, which is ineffective. Our work recommends that these phenomena be impartially observed, held consciously and absorbed as energy. In short, whose food is your anger…unseen vampirish beings or your functioning as a real human being?

    The key to all this is wanting. Consider, what is wanting? To want is to have a desire for something you do not have, meaning a lack of something you desire. Wanting is a loaded gun. In a state of wanting, you are not satisfied with what you have. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want”, says Psalm 23. Wanting is not intrinsically wrong but it is dangerous, meaning not only that in a state of wanting you may not appreciate what you have but also that you may be tested on the lengths to which you will go to get what you want.

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  • How has work on self changed you?

    January 23, 2022

    Let me give you an example. Through the day, as I face events in my daily life, I remember things I have done and said in the past that are related to the present. I cringe at the memory of them. Secretly, I have interpreted my reaction as one of guilt for having done the wrong thing. But as I have observed my reaction carefully, objectively, I observe that guilt is a mischaracterization of my reaction and that is why forgiveness of self by myself or by others has had no effect.

    Following the sensations of my reactions objectively, I observe that the sensations are really an expression of my dislike of making mistakes or imperfect gestures. In fact, my reactions are reactions of ego. As my attention penetrates my reactions without the false interpretation of guilt, I become more free of them and I observe that I am less affected by people and events that challenge my competence. I laugh at my foibles more easily and feel less pressure to perform perfectly. This change arises from observation, not effort or analysis.

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  • Practical Work on Self (PWOS 4)

    October 23, 2021

    You may have wondered about what we were doing on Thursday.

    The world is in a difficult place right now. Can we work together at the heart level to accept the world’s suffering and transform it?

    Tension, fear, agitation and hatred are contagious. As sensations they pass through groups and individuals as a kind of infection. We may find different ‘reasons’ to explain them as they pass through us but they have an independent free-floating existence in the psychic atmosphere. Can we suffer these sensations, transform them in the heart and send back compassion and harmony in response?

    Each of us may need to learn how to do this work in our own way. As you learn you will receive help inwardly from the angels who support this work. The best way to enhance our work on self is to work for the sake of the work and the benefit of others. Help is then made available to us. If you take on the job of a janitor, you will be given a broom

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  • Practical Work on Self (PWOS 3)

    October 18, 2021

    Q. What do you do when you get lost in thinking and you are no longer observing?

    A. I find my sensations. Attention on sensation brings me into the present and that’s the antidote to obsessive thinking. Sensing can mean listening, looking, touching…any sensing will do.

    Q. Can I set some sort of alarm to remind me to sense.

    A. You can try but any such alarm just becomes another soon-ignored external trigger. For me, lost in thought has its own sense of being disembodied, weightless, not located anywhere. When I catch site of that, I suddenly enter myself and the physical place where I am. Coming to myself is a spontaneous event triggered by noticing I am lost and disconnected. Years of observing my automatic functioning have made it possible for me to see it in operation. This falls under the general heading of using sleep to wake up. I think that’s when it becomes possible to change.

    Now, being lost in thought is generally not as innocuous as it sounds. As the thinking apparatus turns over in its habitual rounds, there are also sensations that support those thoughts. Thought and sensation travel together, reinforcing each other and reducing attention to a thin whisper. Attention is enslaved. The habitual rounds of emotional conditioning are energy drains. The small amounts of higher energy available to me are lost.

    Perhaps you think that observation of self is so you can describe your behavior precisely and objectively? There is a benefit to this but it is secondary. Attention itself slowly releases the emotional conditioning held in the body. Attention itself is a catalyst for transformation.

    Suppose I have the sensation of anger. From past observing, I know how anger tends to unfold in me. I know the kind of thinking that this unfolding train of sensation attracts and supports. When I see all this, can my attention withhold and contain the expressions of anger…the words, the gestures…without judgment or justification? If anger can’t continue its habitual movement through the nervous system and the thinking apparatus, it may give up its energy for other uses, like being conscious. This is transformative. It requires an active impartial attention.

    The aim of observing self is to enter an attention space where everything is there in the presence of attention, where inside and outside me are all together in the attention space. How is this achieved? An observer separates and divides a space between observer and observed. In an attention space, attention is the observer and everything is held in its embrace. This is a very deep form of release. I cease to be a bully to myself and my environment. You did know, did you not, that I am my biggest bully, moment by moment, shoulding and coulding and woulding, not seeing what is really there.

    When we don’t have an observer, presence steps into the emptiness, and there is the will to be in attention space where all things are possible.

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  • Practical Work on Self (PWOS 2)

    September 22, 2021

    Q: Why put such emphasis on observation of self? It doesn’t change anything.

    A: It doesn’t change anything quickly but impartial observation of self is the best way I know to change myself and my relationship to life. We are tied up in knots. Strands of habit wired into the muscles, constantly repeated mechanical reactions and fixed self-images prevent insight, limit capacity and drain our higher energies, making it impossible to do the work of a real human being.

    We are heavily programmed and we must de-program so we can see and feel clearly. This does not mean changing the program. De-programming cannot be accomplished by the one who is programmed. So I delegate the task to attention.

    Analysis doesn’t untie the knots unless it triggers impartial attention. So, aim for impartial attention by observing self objectively…physical expressions of self. You will be dealing with the past because all the unresolved problems of the past are with you presently, whether you think about them or not, and they are expressed in the behavior you observe.


    Q: You seem to suggest that attention is a kind of conditioning eraser.

    A: Yes, it’s like that. Habits of behavior and thought are patterns of neurons in the nervous system. The linked patterns are held together with subtle energy we call sensitive energy, the energy of sensation. Patterns can be slowly dissolved by application of a higher energy which clears the energy field. That higher energy is attention. To work, it must be impartial. Why? Impartial attention means attention that is not channeled through, or directed by, the thinker who pretends to inhabit my headbrain. Headbrain attention is too weak to erase my conditioning. I must learn to trust the work to attention.

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