Dear Robert: I’ve only recently made your online acquaintance (thanks much, Joan), but you have become a must-see commentator. From my perspective, you combine kindness and compassion with honesty and authenticity, which can be misconstrued as insensitive or confrontational. I appreciate the combination very much.
If I may, I’d like to take you back to your essay from late May -- Freefall: the Noticer is Noticed -- where you say noticing the noticer in addition to all other thoughts and feelings is a perspective called awake. I agree with that and everything else in that post.
My question is how that noticing arises, because for me at least, freefall of experience when the noticer is included is not a one-and-done event. The asleep me sometimes remembers to include or look for the noticer, and often just that remembering will instantly occasion waking. But the sleeping “bundle of thoughts and feelings” has a practice that includes meditating and brief verbal tips that seem to make wakefulness a more frequent perspective. Is my practice an attempt to “capture water in a sieve,” as you paint the useless compulsion to dissect freefall? Being awake sure feels more alive and real. So the practice continues.
Hi. Thanks for the kind words. Honesty can seem insensitive or confrontational. Perhaps this is because uncontrived, honest speech is uncommon. Many of us have learned to hide what we see and feel to present a “better” version to the world. I am not on board with that. I just say what I see and let the chips fall where they may.
If practicing meditation seems useful to you, who am I to say it isn't? As I have tried to make clear in all my communications, my ideas are not intended to be authoritative. They are phenomenology--a personal confession of my experience--not "teaching." When I say that I have no practice, that is not intended to discourage others from pursuing "awakening" in whatever way seems helpful. As for me, I just take things as they come, step by step, with no hope or desire to attain any particular state of mind. For me, this right now is it--the only it there is.
I wish you well.
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I love your answer Robert. As the questioner sounds like a knowledge seeker, I would offer them another angle.
It sounds like there is an effort of sorts too experience something specific, or be a certain way, that implicitly they believe they are not already.
I think that is why they suggest the idea that they may be "capturing water in a sieve." I agree with Robert that there is nothing to do about this, there is just the experience of aliveness and that is what is happening in it, however in so far as there is an imagined "problem" there is a corresponding solution.
What might be helpful to the questioner is the idea of discriminating awareness from the reflection of awareness. The experience of "noticing the noticer" is not the infinite loop it appears to be, but rather the seeming difference between awareness (actionless knowing) and the mind/intellect/I sense which is its reflection. This is not a real split, it just looks like one. However, it is useful temporarily to distinguish between that actionless knowing (which is just "what is" apparently knowing itself), and the belief in individuality that results from taking the mind to be "me."
In my experience, this discrimination between the reality of "what is" and imagination (the idea of separateness and incompleteness), resolved this dilemma. It didn't do so by magic or by changing experience, it did so by knowledge, recognizing the difference between self and objects, and then also removing that idea. That's the crucial part. If that idea, the teaching remnant so to speak, is not removed, then all we have done is Replace one version of not being awake with another better looking version of also not being awake. That better looking version may look better, but it's worse because we actually think we are awake (a.k.a. something special) when in fact we have just adopted a more pleasing but equally false self image.