Locating Experience

Q. I’ve read so many books and know all the theory about becoming enlightened, but I find it difficult to respond to what you ask in these sessions…

A I warn you (seriously)--I am not some ’Enlightened’ being. The truth is simply that I have grasped some things, I've had a good training, and I have a natural bent towards clarity, and I try to pass these on when I encounter responsive people.

Like the osprey, sometimes I grasp the fish, but sometimes I am searching and searching for that gleam in the lake.

Necessity, you see! The spindle of Necessity around which the world turns.

Now here's a re-cap of your inner gymnastic exercises, for both our educations! The point is to grasp experience, not think about it.

With prompting, in our session you finally located the feeling associated with symbols you came up with eg, (light permeating water, freshness, stillness behind etc.) in the chest area. You identified the fact that the feeling has no boundaries--does not stop at the edges of the body, and can extend right out the window to the scene without. So it is all the same feeling, but able to be located in chest area.

Q.: Is this chest area the 'source' would you say? Or is it just a place at which I can capture it?

A. Does it seem like the source? We’re dealing with experience, not thought. But as you see, it’s possible to utilise the space of the body to track a location-- not necessarily a permanent location, but an identifiable place for now. Space rather than time: 'Time' expressions (eg. ‘being present’, Now’, eternal etc.) will most often lead you into concept.

When asked ‘where is 'I', you started to split 'yourself' into parts, one which repudiated the other, clearly thinking itself superior or more acceptable!

Both, however, were your 'I'/selves, and therefore you might like to ask:

Could there be an even better ‘I’ around somewhere?

An enlightened one, maybe? Or a nearly-enlightened one, of very high calibre which only appears occasionally when the conditions are right?

Mmm, could be...they’re like Russian dolls, these 'I's...!

But when asked ‘who is doing the noticing’, you were stumped. (Correctly!)

Then did what our dear teacher used to call " an eel-wriggling" move, and announced it was’ Awareness’.

In so doing you shifted from looking out from, to looking back at, and therefore you (?) could label Awareness as if it were some nameable objective thing. That's the eel-wriggle. Who was doing the labelling?

The trick is to stay with experience, gaze back into it and hold it. If you can slap a tidy label on it, you've missed it, and created a thought-object.

It is legit, however, to try to capture in an image or metaphor which contains the feeling. This will enable you to re-visit and re-experience.

So turn back to where you're gazing from.

It's about learning to discern the intangible.

"Faith...the substance...the evidence of things unseen."