Hajj - Dialog with Pema

.Dear Sophia,

Thank you so much for your detailed descriptions of your
experiences with Hajj, in your two emails!

The sense of appreciation of life comes through very clearly,
and the notion of being able to start again, from scratch in
some way.  In Christianity there is the term "born again",
and even though that term is often misused, especially by
fundamentalist Christians, in itself it is a beautlful notion.

I'm glad also to see the connection you made with the PaB idea
of dropping what you have in order to see what you are; for

example in what you wrote:

> my personal feeling in ihram is : this is me , remove my tag name ,
> remove my family name , remove my name , remove my titles , remove
> my certificate , remove my social status

I find it very inspiring to see and feel these parallels between
what we are trying to share in PaB, and what you feel in your
religion, and what others in PaB experience in their own traditions,
from Christianity to Hinduism to Taoism and other ones.  Sometimes
people get the impression that PaB is dominated by Buddhism, and
indeed, perhaps half  of the regular PaB participants have an
interesting in some form of Buddhism, but we definitely have
equal room for all traditions.

I was intrigued also by what you wrote:

> thats why it was said : take your chance between the 2 inhalations

Can you tell us more about that?  Does that mean to be conscious
of your life during every breath you take?

Thank you again,

Pema

_____

Hello

To answer the question i must say first that there is dropping and there is a dropping

what we do in pab we do it to explore , we drop for a minute then we back  to our normal sense of time and place , traditions and habits

in my religion dropping -tajarud- we do it to see better to act better and eventually to reach heavens

we hold on it and live it , and we dont drop what would not modify our life , we usually dont drop time and space , we dont drop hope

it is not a  concious the state we reach after dropping , it is a glimps of  conciousness and we keep refining it everyday

and you may lose that  concious you got by forgetfullness , being overwhiled by worries and such , human is weak physically and spiritually , we tend to go hopless for the silliest things in life , our hawa and inflated ego  also work as anti  concious

what we do daily is trying to explore a new aspect of  conciousness for one issue then add it to prevous conciousness or correcting it or modifying it , the point is you would not hold on that insight perminantly unless you work on it daily

the poeple who actually drop all layers that were covering their insight are few , belived to be prophets and few others

those are said to see things on their reality , human are not humans , one might look like a pig a donkey or dog , depend on what animal he/she resemble most with his/her acts

rocks are not the static rocks so is trees and all things in this world of  conciousness and we keep refining it everyday

i hope this answers the question :)

_____

Thank you again, Sophia, for your thoughtful reflections!

Yes, PaB is unusually radical/different from most traditional
forms of practice, at least in spirit.  In practice, it may well
be that many or most of us in PaB "drop things for a minute and
then get back to normal life" but the idea is to gradually learn
to extend that attitude more and more and to let it pervade our
whole life -- with "dropping" in the spirit of "wearing lightly";
dropping a heavy attitude, living more in a wu-wei way.

PaB also does not aim at reaching any conscious state; rather the
idea is to drop any notion of "state" (though at first that may
seem strange if not impossible).  Catching glimpese and refining
them is a perfectly fine way of working with PaB as well, either
just with PaB, or in combination with any other tradition.

And yes, I don't expect anyone in PaB quickly to rise to a level
of insight comparable to that of prophets or saints in any of the
main religious traditions.  Rather, the emphasis is not so much
on "realization" as such but rather "play as" or specifically
"play as Being" in order to already invite and invoke the
fulness of Being well before any kind of "complete realization".

This is the most difficult aspect of Play as Being to convey,
and yet also the most central aspect.

Thank you again,

Pema