Experimenting Noticing

I recently listened to the first class of Radical Deconditioning again. It's a class that I took in the winter with Leela and Dharmen Swann-Herbert. I have an all left oriented mind, so it's good for me to listen to things - classes, lectures - more than once. I tend to miss a lot the first time. The last time I took the class I was dating Devin and part way through it he broke up with me. It was certainly the most difficult breakup I had ever experienced, and part of my coping strategy had been to try to prove that I was really good at noticing.

Now I am not taking the class with anyone. I'm just listening to it and doing the exercises on my own. The first class is all about the transformative power of observation and experimentation. This is really the foundation for what Leela and Dharmen have to teach (or so it seems to me).

Their claim is that there is nothing we can do to get our minds to surrender to our lives. There is nothing we can do to get our minds to trust our lives. (Which leaves me wondering why Dharmen was yelling at me "you have to trust life!" the last time we spoke, but it seems everyone is full of contradictions.) The only thing we CAN do, they say, is to observe our life - to observe the mind, to observe our body, to observe the world outside of us, and to observe the things that we say. Observing, they say, is the key to transforming our lives. The transformation happens on it's own, the surrender happens on its own - but the observation is something we can do.

My friend Ashley came to visit about a week ago. It was hard to have him here because I am lost in a fog. He told me about a game. You sit in one spot in the woods and you sit there until you see a hair. You will always see a hair if you wait long enough. The trick is that you can't be looking for it. When you start looking for it, you don't find it. If you can relax your mind and let the hair present itself to you, it will. If you look, nope.

So I was out for a hike yesterday (on account of having met the girl in the tree the day before) and I found myself on someone else's property. I heard some folks coming my way. It was dense woods and so I felt safely hidden, but didn't want to take any chances, so I sat down to wait for them to pass. With nothing else to do I thought I would try the hair game.

First thing I thought was, what if I don't find a hair? am I going to be really disappointed in myself if I have to give up? maybe I shouldn't make this kind of commitment. Am I just setting myself up? Then I relaxed, remembered what Ashley said - that you only find the hairs when you're not looking for it - and I started to adjust my seated position when lo and behold - a hair. Then another.

Cool!

It was easy. The first time. But I found myself once again resting in the woods and once again the thought came through - maybe I'll try the hair game while I sit here. This time I was really scared. The chances of me succeeding twice in a row seemed slim. My mind was sort of sure that it wouldn't happen, but it was also really excited by the idea that it would. I remembered what Ashley said - that you only find the hairs when you're not looking - but it didn't help this time; I couldn't stop looking.

What happened next was illuminating. I watched as my mind tried to get itself to surrender. I watched it try to trick itself into thinking it had surrendered. I watched it get mad at itself for not being able to surrender. I watched it try to trick itself into surrendering. And then, finally in desperation, I saw it give up completely. And then I found a hair.

What was illuminating was not so much the truth of Ashley's statement, but the struggle that my mind had with accepting the truth of it, and implementing it. It's the same struggle that I have with my life. During the hair game I got to see on a micro scale what is happening in my mind in relationship to my life on the macro scale.

I got to see it. heh, but that's all. I just got to see it. There's nothing else that I get. I don't get to change it. I don't get to teach anyone about it. I don't get to convince other people that it's important. I don't even know if it is important.

I have spent my life exploring this consciousness and I can't say that I have found much reward in that investigation. I just haven't found anything else yet that seems more worth doing.

So, I've been watching. For the last few days.

Most of the time my mind is able to convince me that it's dramas and complaints are legitimate. Often times I'm able to convince other people too - that part scares me. It means I am responsible for what I say. I can't count on other people to call me out. I thought I could. At least, that's what John made me think. I mean, that's what he told me he could do. I thought that was the key to healing my relationship with my life - having someone else tell me when I was lying to myself, but there's no one else who can see through me the way I can see through myself. That's not what a projector is for - to tell you what's true and what's not true for you. I don't know what we're here for, but right now it seems silly to me to think that we are here to help generators live their lives as themselves. It seems to me that we are here to guide large groups of generators in large scale projects. But maybe that's just this projector.

Sorry, there's still a lot of anti-John left in me.

{There's a female cardinal sitting on the back porch. She is just sitting there, and has been for some time now. It's rare that the birds sit there so still, usually they are eating, or they are in the trees. Oop, there she goes, down to the feeder. Bright orange beak.}

So, I don't know. Things seem like they are getting more honest every day. And there is no Devin now in which to frame that progress. No one to prove things to. No one to try to hold onto. Just myself. Which seems good.




cool photo of brain rays: http://www.metaphysics-for-life.com/mind-over-matter.html