Report 45

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'. :)

My sense is that it is possible to 'live this way'... from that place, by continually offering up all that happens... good, bad, indifferent, subtle to mundane. 

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'.  We talk about not catering to ordinary mind, maybe thinking that we're after 'super' mind, but 'bare' 'naked' 'ordinary' 'natural' mind seems a turn or pointer to a deep place of rest available at all times in whatever happens.   

Not easy to write about. :)

Follow the inner witness rather than the outer ones

Well today I'm thinking of outer witness as 'conventional wisdom' and 'ordinary mind'... as timelines and normal logic, 'plans', hopes, dreams, signs... what appears to be so. Also in this category would be things like "good intentions'. There are many layers, more and more subtle.

Cultivating Inner witness, though terms like inner/outer do not actually apply ultimately, would be Knowing in the sense of our first slogan... operating in a way that makes way for a wisdom that bypasses scheming and self-consciousness... or at least puts it into perspective.

-In reading reports from others I start to think about the phrase 'timeless awareness', and how to even consider dropping conceptions of time, one then drops conceptions of death, body, birth. Certainly conceptualizations of an 'i' in that can't be found.' What' would be doing the conceptualizing?

One can't 'do' anything with this. I was really sparked by Dao talking about not living this way day to day, because I sometimes wonder if others stand back and think about what a wonderous thing it is to have appetite and energy toward living from this place... access and sense of SUCH freedom, but look around at all the relatively silly things going on and think they should be no-brainers for someone glimpsing primordial awareness?!?! It just doesn't make sense from the view of 'me living my life'.

'Someone' can't 'do' anything with this... can't be manipulated or contrived to serve 'someone'... so I guess someone and all their problems just have to keep surrendering? dissolving? being material?

And yes, here I let go of the grappling, grasping that engages to now 'figure out' my question. haha

At the end of Zen's report he asks why we care what people think of us, which brought to mind a favorite Rumi:

These spiritual window-shoppers,
who idly ask, 'How much is that?' Oh, I'm just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital.

What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop.

 Where did you go? "Nowhere."
What did you have to eat? "Nothing much."

 Even if you don't know what you want,
buy _something,_ to be part of the exchanging flow.

Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah.

It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you.