2018.05.13 - Day 60

/waves
Still here. Skipped some days, but mostly deeply personal writings. Or writings into separate notes and not taking time/energy to edit again to web.

Hard not to be affected by an auditorium of about 400 persons who will soon walk from one side of a stage to the other side. On a simple walk they will bow, shake some hands, recieve a diploma and the cheers of the crowd. On a simple walk they move from the life of the last year(s) to the next phase.
Reading in the program:
"You are here; you are living; lit it be that way - that is mindfulness. Your heart pulsates and you breathe. All kinds of things are happening in you at once. Let mindfulness work with that; let that be mindfulness. Let every beat of your heart, every breath, be mindfulness itself."
- Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche (Founder of Naropa University)
Speaker was Krista Tippett, founder and leader of the "On Being Project". To Do list nows has 'listen to all those podcasts'.

Congratulations, Riddle and family. So moving!

Watched some Yuval Harari videos. That guy is just so brilliant and so clear. Wonder if that is helped by his 2 hours of vipassana each day. He makes some frightening predictions about how big data and algorithms will soon know more about us than we know ourselves. Like Amazon telling me which books to buy and Spotify what music I would like to play. Perhaps that's the start of it. BIG Brother was a tame scenario compared to this.

'If you diligently practice self-observation, you will see much that is painful and much that is joyful, but seeing more of reality will turn out to be highly preferable to living in fantasy.' says Tart. I am used to self observation in meditation but not quite sure how to be applying it all the time to my daily life. Perhaps the 9 seconds every 15 mins idea would work here hmm.

Congratulations Riddle to you and whoever it was in your family. :)

Congratulations, Riddle, to you and yours!

Zen - I wonder what the optimum practice time is, whether for vipassana or for anything else. I suspect it depends both on the type of practice and on the individual. And maybe also on their stage of practice. Does the expected efficacy plateau after a certain daily duration of practice? And at some point you must start cutting into the time left in your day where you can usefully apply its benefits!

Tart's comment reminds me of Albert Camus. He advocates not running from the Absurd, neither physically nor into intellectual or religious fantasies. Instead he advocates facing it squarely, living with integrity (in "revolt", as he would say). I would humbly suggest that any regular "dropping" practice (such as the 9 seconds) would help achieve and maintain that sort of authenticity. :)

Catching up with Conference of the Birds, also sorting through notes and dreams, writing.

It is such a funny phenomenon that if you look into any thing deeply enough, everything is connected, like my consideration today of the 'giving up' required of the birds, and that's resemblance to... vipassana meditation.

Also to connection, and unlearning isolation. Giving up striving, embracing what is, expressions of connection are quite natural. edited 19:22, 13 May 2018

I have been trying to keep up my practice in the midst of a week of activity that seems to drain my energy and consume all my time.

My practice has settled into something fairly simple and direct. Sometime early in the day, I do the "morning exercise" from Tart's book, which is basically an exercise in directed (or voluntary) attention. Then, whenever I can during the day, I return to self-remembering. This is a simple act of will, deliberately directing attention into what I am seeing, hearing, feeling in the moment. Very simple and basic, but I go for long periods of time when I totally forget to do it. Thinking and the demands of situations quickly capture my attention, and then I am the dog chasing sticks again, instead of the lion deliberately choosing where to direct its gaze. Still, this feels "doable" in an interesting way, and I am going to keep at it.

In some ways, this practice seems similar to Buddhist mindfulness-awareness meditations I have done in the past, but it has a distinctly different "flavor". There is more of a sense of flow to it. For example, instead of sitting with attention focused one-pointedly on an object of meditation, this practice involves continually shifting attention to different parts of the body, or to different things in the visual field. Tart advises scanning the visual field by shifting the gaze from one thing to another every few seconds, and not resting the eyes for too long on any one object. A fixed gaze, he says, tends to induce a trance state, which is not what is desired here.