You seeing Being seeing II

From: Stepping out of the way, 2008, July 28

You Seeing Being Seeing

Pema Pera: The idea is to spend a short time becoming more aware of the way you are normally seeing the world, visually, using your eyes, in the normal way. Looking at objects in front of you, being aware of the cone of your field of vision
Pema Pera: And then, in the second half, you switch to “Being seeing” where you let Being see, but not in a physical way. You let Being see everything, outer and inner things and thoughts and feelings and memories, anything at all. At first it probably takes more than 9 sec in total. Perhaps one minute you seeing and one minute Being seeing.
Pema Pera: but after a while, with practice, you can do it, say three or four seconds each — or longer, whatever you prefer. Pema Pera: Several of us have written about it in our blogs, Storm for example. http://stormerne.blogspot.com/
Pema Pera: Gaya, you have tried it too, haven’t you?
Gaya Ethaniel: Well… I do it without trying if that makes sense. Well before you came up with the suggestion.
Pema Pera: Sure, many ways to approach it
Gaya Ethaniel: Do you remember Pema the session with Adele? I asked ‘who is seeing Being’? She explained using seeing my hand. At the time, I felt Being seeing me and everything. So I wondered and put the question in the session there and then. Have to admit though now experiencing Being is changing all the time for me.
Gaya Ethaniel: So I’d very much like to hear your personal experience Pema of YSBS
Pema Pera: There are many ways in which this practice plays out for me. And in some form or other I have been doing this for the last three years or so
Gaya Ethaniel: When did it happen first time? Was there any triggers?
Pema Pera: The notion of Being, as a word/pointer/name is something I came across 28 years ago and I have been exploring it since then. That was from the book Space, Time, Knoweledge and in the last three years I stumbled upon ways to shift more directly from me doing a kind of practice to letting Being do the practice.
Pema Pera: It is very very difficult to talk about this clearly. Since the shift is at the same time very subtle and very big, very big in changing the experience enormously but subtle in that the description in words is almost the same, between before and after. Perhaps the best way for me to describe it is to say that I learned to step out of the way
Pema Pera: Which sounds like a kind of devotion, Trust. Letting Being be/work/do
Gaya Ethaniel: Know what you mean. I do that a lot too these day, i phrase it as ‘listening to my heart’
Pema Pera: Yes, there is that devotional side, heart connection
Gaya Ethaniel: my teacher calls it ‘innate wisdom’
Pema Pera: What I can describe are only side effects like finding a lot of energy, clarity, peace in the middle of busy action, silence and openness.
Pema Pera: All that grows, and changes from moment to moment. For me, too, for a short while I feel I can really let Being Be, and then for a while I feel back into the role of a doer. One change over time is that the periods have become shorter for me, shorter and shorter and the transitions lighter and easier.

Peace in the middle of busy action

Pema Pera: PaB is conducted by Being, and we all are like individual instruments in one great symphony
Gaya Ethaniel: As Pia pointed out yesterday, we are somehow connected it seems
Pema Pera: Yes, you could even say, more than connected, already one
Gaya Ethaniel: Yes, one
Pema Pera: At and the same time also different. Being goes beyond polarities, dichotomies.
Gaya Ethaniel: What did you think I meant by ‘one’ then?
Pema Pera: I don’t know, what did you mean?
Gaya Ethaniel: hm… just everything seems to be joined with each other - no separateness, this is how I sense Being
Pema Pera: No separateness, for sure, yet also room for distinctions. Paradoxical when we put it into words but natural for Being.
Gaya Ethaniel: Could you expand a little on room for distinctions?
Pema Pera: From a relative point of view, we are all different
Gaya Ethaniel: Is it like when an orchestra plays?
Pema Pera: Yes, like different instruments
Gaya Ethaniel: So we were on the same thing then when we typed ‘one’ :)
Pema Pera: But from an absolute point of view, everything is “of the one taste”
Pema Pera: I think so, yes, why did you think there was a difference?
Gaya Ethaniel: Just thought that you meant we were on different pages when i saw ‘at and the same time also different’
Pema Pera: Oh no, that was not a comment on what you wrote. I tried to say “one and yet also many” at the same time
Pema Pera: “Allowing differences yet no real separation”

Judgement and YSBS

Pema Pera: I do not want to make any judgments there. The main judgment, the single judgment that I like to make concerns the difference between “me doing something” and letting Being see/do/be and that is not a judgment on your way or my way or anyone’s way.
Gaya Ethaniel: Not sure what you mean. is there a need to make any judgement? You said you trust.
Pema Pera: I notice myself that one moment I see myself as the doer, the center, the self and the next moment I can let Being be/see. That distinction is crucial.
Pema Pera: The judgment that allows you to see the difference is crucial.
Gaya Ethaniel: Do you make that judgement consciously?
Pema Pera: It is a matter of learning to see/sense/know that difference. That is difficult to answer in that form. It is not me.
Gaya Ethaniel: So it does come ‘naturally’
Pema Pera: And yet it is me. It is me who seems to “lose it.” and the next moment I see through the mistaken sense of losing it — or more accurately, It sees that.
Gaya Ethaniel: I’m not asking ‘who’ is making the judgement. I’m asking ‘how.’
Pema Pera: How is also difficult the answer but the experience is totally different.
Gaya Ethaniel: sometimes i wonder we are trying something we can't accomplish in PaB, if our main purpose is to discuss in words
Pema Pera: when “I” see it is like walking around with a heavy backpack, while if Being sees, there is a lightness that is amazing, very different
Pema Pera: the central point is that we cannot accomplish anything :) Yet we keep trying. I kept trying not to try for many decades :>)
Gaya Ethaniel: Do you believe ‘trying’ is good thing to do?
Pema Pera: Yes and no. Recently a phrase cam e up in these sessions “effort without desire.” That was a very nice expression.
Pema Pera: We have to use effort in some sense. We have to stay with it, be galvanized as Stim likes to say. Yet as long as there is an “I” doing the effort we are cut off, or seem to be cut off, from Being. Being is centerless

An airplane as a metaphor

Pema Pera: going from YS to BS is like flying an airplane, and going from being the pilot to being a passenger
Gaya Ethaniel: seems to expand from me as a centre at times
Pema Pera: In the BS part there is no center
Pema Pera: At first it may seem that way, switching from you as a center in YS to Being as a center in BS. But that implies that you have created a subtle version of you as a kind of super-you, a kind of God image perhaps
Gaya Ethaniel: At times yes like something above me, but at times no
Pema Pera: Yes and that is not wrong. That may well be a good way to start to begin to feel your way out of your usual perspective. But that is not yet Being seeing. It is more like “you seeing You seeing” :) Stepping aside means giving up, even giving up any notion of center. No center means no separation, the greatest intimacy possibly
Pema Pera: The intimacy of Love
Gaya Ethaniel: I see myself seeing myself seeing myself and so on once in a while only when I’m making ‘judgements’
Pema Pera: yes
Gaya Ethaniel: oh i c. So for me it’s on and off with BS
Pema Pera: for all of us :) Unless we are fully enlightened Buddhas or the like . . . I do not want to make judgments between different people, let alone avatars :) The only judgment is between the YS and the BS.
Gaya Ethaniel: here you are using ‘judgement’ in different sense I feel from what we discussed before in regards to Being making ‘judgement’ - am i right?
Pema Pera: I am talking on the relative level