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Find the consciousness you had before you were born

This week I've been considering moments of 'first sight'... zero-ing in on a sense of immediacy and what as I'm writing now I think of as a 'bright leap' ... an essential 'yes' that just makes pure, clear, and obvious sense.

I have two recent examples:

-One in which I purposefully forgot about a 'problem' that had been going on for a while, and walking into the kitchen was struck by a 'knowing' that a certain person had already stepped in to the situation, solving it. I THEN contacted the person who indeed stepped right in.

-Another which I an artist friend passed along a link to her new work, which I clicked on 'as usual'. I generally like her work, but having known her for 20 years it is part of my routine to appreciate it in a certain way... expecting to sit with it and consider where she's at, etc. Instead I was struck immediately by tears. There was no thinking, but a spontaneously *direct* experience of the work.

I would term these things 'sightings' which bypass all ordinary reasoning and constructs and contriving... Rare, Bare, As is. I can say that these moments sometmes seem very long though they happen in an instant... in what my 11 year old son would call 'heaven time'. :)

As I write this I determine to share and appreciate them in a way that doesn't try to hold on or catalogue or use them as lessons. :)

Going back to the koan discussion, this also seems to be 'the place' a koan cracks open access to, and I think it is well beyond what we typically think of as a sense of 'aha'. 

Follow the inner witness rather than the outer ones

I often think of outer witnesses as the critics at the gates yelling 'look here look there', 'you should be doing this, you should be doing that'. They might be the only voices 'small i' is able to hear. They generally only see the small picture and how 'you' relate to 'them'... mere opinions rather than wisdom.

Also in this category would be things like "good intentions' which are ultimately ineffective and perhaps even destructive.

Creative writers, artists, etc. have tools for dealing with these "crazy makers" as Julia Cameron calls them ... for protecting the conducive space, so that a kind of flowing gap moment (a type of 'directness' talked about above I guess) is activated without obstruction.