2018.05.28 - Day 75

Tart says 'You can actually set a physical alarm to help you self-remember. I have used the "beep beep" sound my digital watch makes on each hour as a reminder to "Wake up!" You can resolve to use particular kinds of events as alarms: "Every time I talk to my grocer, I will remember myself?"

Tart, Charles T.. Waking Up: Overcoming the Obstacles to Human Potential (Kindle Locations 4597-4600). Fearless Books. Kindle Edition.

Sounds very like pab doesn't it? Also like Thich Nhat Hanhs' gathas. But Tart also says that we can become habituated to prompts like these. We can pay more attention to everyday tasks and group work is good. Other will notice our lack of attention more easily. It sounds more and more like Mindfulness practice to me. I still can't quite grasp the idea of concentrating on arms and legs with a small part of my attention ALL the time. As soon as I start to concentrate on something else, like typing this, I lose that. Seems to me it's like multi-tasking, which I have read, is a myth. Our brains can only concentrate on one thing at a time, even though rapidly switching from one thing to the other seems like multi-tasking.

>>Sounds very like pab doesn't it? Also like Thich Nhat Hanhs' gathas. But Tart also says that we can become habituated to prompts like these.<<

Thank you for articulating this, Zen! It has been a question for me too, but what soothed my concern somewhat is that habituation isn't necessarily counterproductive. Habituation may mean a new baseline that then makes way for further opening. In the case of our pauses, or self-remembering, or reality checks, or rituals around considerations of food, I think it eventually gives way to spontaneity... to unprompted knowings. Then a back and forth kind of dance, then... Play?

I felt myself dying to retreat today, prompted by a few things. One of them was reading the chat log Wol posted with she and Bertie, the other listening to a fantastic podcast about Michael Pollan's new book. It is about psychedelics, but more-so, it is about honestly exploring what there already is to work with regarding what humans might be and what might be needed as well as available, when humans are in mental crisis. I mentioned a Netflix show a while back, called The Last Shaman. It wasn't a 'great' movie, but it did speak to important questions... the kinds of questions Pollan is finally getting to bring to the mainstream conversation.

This relates to my exploration how? Connection. Part of what I loved in the discussion was hearing that what people often find on their quests, is what I think we know already, that love is the answer. To quote Mick, love becomes "overwhelming in their life." As Pollan said, "It isn't in the molecule."

If interested:
https://samharris.org/podcasts/127-freedom-known/ edited 01:18, 29 May 2018

Zen, I sympathize. I'm not sure I could concentrate "on arms and legs with a small part of my attention ALL the time" either!

As mentioned a few days ago, I CAN do this kind of "background" meditation with ASMR very easily, for as long as I want, including as I type this. But that kind of meditation is linked to breathing, and can be felt strongly in one's head, face and neck (and to some extent in one's shoulders and upper back). It's very pleasant and easy to meditate on, both exclusively in the foreground, and in the background while doing something else.

ASMR is not customarily linked to being felt in a peripheral appendage. For an experienced practitioner, however, it IS possible to bring hands and arms, feet and legs into the compass of the ASMR enough to meditate separately on it, as a foreground meditation. I wouldn't assume that a novice could do it. And it does seem harder to do other things at the same time than it is with the ASMR sensation around the head. That means background meditation with ASMR and hands and legs would seem a non-starter after all.

Continuing the Play-Forms in Art chapter in Home Ludens. Huizinga is talking about the "plastic arts", a term I've not used before.

Odd, isn't it, that in modern times we use the term Art ambiguously, as sometimes it can be specific and mean painting or sculpture, and now also the digital arts, and at other time it can be more general and refer to any creative pursuit within the Arts, including writing, music and drama. That didn't seem to be the case in Ancient Greece. Their inspirational goddesses, the Muses, dealt with music (μουσική "art of the Muses"), poetry, history, drama, dance and astronomy (I'm not sure how that last one snuck in!) but no painting or sculpture.

I'm not sure that "concentrating" is the right word for describing the kind of attention that Tart talks about in self-remembering. To me, "concentration" suggests a narrowing and tightening of the scope of attention. The exercise is actually about expanding and opening the scope of attention to include not just arms and legs, but body sensations, hearing, and vision all at the same time. I find I can do that, at least for short periods, and it does bring a heightened sense of presence that might even be described as "lucid". Even if I can't maintain it all the time, I find some value in returning to it as often as I am able, and in observing how easily my mind gets pulled away into the "autopilot" mode of thinking and acting.

It may be true that we can only attend to one thing at at time, but the definition of a "thing" is fluid and changeable. If you see ten birds in the sky and think of each one as a "thing", you might think it is impossible to attend to all of them at once. But if the birds are a flock of geese flying in formation, it is quite easy to attend to the whole flock as a single thing. Or you can choose to narrow your attention to a single goose within the formation, in which case the flock no longer registers as a "thing".

Perhaps the purpose of self-remembering is to merge the different sense modalities of immediate experience into a coherent whole (or gestalt), and attend to that whole as a way of coaxing awareness out of the habitual thought patterns and roles that Tart calls consensus trance.

Alma, this is beautifully said!