2018.05.21 - Day 68

I find Tart's idea of self-remembering, of staying aware of legs and arms constantly extremely difficult. As soon as I concentrate on something else it's gone. And don't we need to fully concentrate on tasks at hand?

He equates strong desires over a long period of time with a type of 'unwitting prayer:
'Thus a consistently held desire for something acted as an unwitting "prayer," a petition or direction of intention to higher levels of reality, whether that desire was expressed as a formal petitionary prayer or not.' And these desire can have consequences for our lives:

'As Gurdjieff frequently expressed it, your being attracts your life. Many other things affect your life, of course, but your attitudes and identities affect your world in many ways that tend to create reflections of themselves.'

This sounds very like 'The Law of Attraction' philosophy a woman in SL used to teach. But do we have any control over the interests and desires that make up our being? You can want something but you can't make yourself want something, I think.

Tart, Charles T.. Waking Up: Overcoming the Obstacles to Human Potential (Kindle Locations 4446-4448). Fearless Books. Kindle Edition.

Zen, I have to agree that to practice self-remembering all the time seems nearly impossible, or at least something that could be achieved only after years of practice. It seems that I can really do this only when there is nothing else commanding my attention. It is especially difficult to do in social situations, where I am listening to and interacting with other people. When I am able to do it, however, there is a sense of being present and awake in a way that makes me want to continue the practice as well as I am able to.

William James' chapter on attention in his classic psychology text (which I have also been reading) has some interesting insights to offer. For example, he says that we can really only attend to one thing at a time. We can, however, group several objects together into a group and attend to the group as if it were one larger object. That seems to be what the morning exercise does, where you first attend to parts of your body (foot, lower leg, upper leg, hand, etc.) separately, and then attend to both arms and legs together as a single configuration. Add listening and looking to that, and it seems that the exercise is trying to get us to merge the different sensory modes of our present experience into a panoramic whole and keep our attention on that.

James also asserts that voluntary attention cannot be maintained for more than a few seconds at a time. Attention naturally goes to whatever is of interest, and if we willfully place attention on an object that has no intrinsic interest to us, our attention will quickly stray. It seems to me that the habitual thought/emotion patterns that Gurdjieff calls false personality exert a strong fascination and so continually pull attention out of immediately experiencing the present. But over time, maybe the present-moment experience opened up by self-remembering acquires its own interest and can hold attention for longer and longer periods.

I dreamed vivid dreams last night. It may have been the first time since dream sessions began that I'm sure that PaB and dream sessions entered directly into my dreams (someone telling me I need to use my hands more when I talk [in RL] but my understanding that this meant hands would also be more prominent in dreams), but, also having a period of dream-thinking about Tart and Gurdjieff and Huizinga. I haven't directly entered into these conversations here, or not much, but have certainly been learning from them. So last night I was sort of visualizing play models of self-remembering. It felt highly connected with Step 2 of the practice of "Shifting" I began 99 Days with, in the first place.

Note: before bed I gazed at my hands as a practice pre-dreaming.

Hm, as for isolation, not much to be found to examine today! edited 23:40, 21 May 2018

Zen, when I first learned to meditate 45 years ago, I didn't know what I was meditating on! Turns out it was what is nowadays called the autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR). And that was cool because you could do it continually - absolutely all the time! - even while doing other things or while talking. (I managed it while sleeping a few times.) If I chose, I could make ASMR meditation help me stay aware of particular parts of my body. In your case that would be arms and legs. And if that's important for you, it may be worth investigating.

Lots of cooking today! For my wife's packed lunches for the rest of the week, and Egg Tarka Dhal for dinner. Or was that Egg Dhansak? My own recipe too. Hmm... As my fellow Dudeism friends would say, "Well, Dude, we just don't know."

Two PaB sessions. Read up the prescribed passage of Conference of the Birds for one of them.

I've now freed up 325 prims (!) in the Kuan Yin Terraces at ground level without removing anything. And I've straightened out a few things and even added a gardener's workshop. This is important preparation to building aloft (a PaB library or whatever it turns out to be). Best to know what the resources will be ahead of time. Looks like 1680 prims will be available.

Began "The Elements of Mythopoiesis" in Homo Ludens. May finish that tomorrow.