A. Month of April

Note - up to the 13th 07:00

 

Play as Being officially began as planned on April 1, 2008 at 7:00 am SLT with five participants who remain anonymous. Storm was present at the 13:00 pm session with Pema and two others. The 19:00 included Maxine, Friedrich, Dakini, Bunun and Pema. Unsurprisingly the main topic of these sessions was the 9-second approach and maintaining a log fo the results. At the end of the evening session, Maxine predicted:

Maxine Walden: I can see hanging around here will really widen my horizons :-)

The second day began the posting of the full log for the session and a discussion of blogs. There is a great amount of enthusiasm among the first attendees and many were keeping logs or writing blogs. Some of the people attending these first sessions came into Second Life to come to the group so some discusssion touches on how to do things. Storm was a great source of information. Dakini had been very gracious in inviting the group into the teahouse and the group is first a bit tentative in its usage. Dakini put them at ease. On the fourth day it is surprising to see Pema wonder about how this experiment will turn out:

Pema Pera: no idea where this is going to
Pema Pera: in the long run
Pema Pera: we’ll see!

Throughout the month of April, PaB met three times a day and Pema was the guardian for almost all of them. The enthusiasm lasted as many of the early attendees attended so many sessions, some more than one session a day.

The Hall of Appearance was born on April 7. The plan was to use one of the smaller room for sessions and move into the large hall when there were many visitors. Pema noted the following about his name for the building:

The background is formed by a favorite sentence of mine: “appreciate the presence of appearance as a presentation by Being” — appearance as what appears, raw, direct, before turning it into ex-perience, by a subject of an object.

Throughout the month there is discussion about how to use the building including making it into a library. There is consideration of creating a bar within sight of the teahouse.

On April 8 Maxine summed up her practice at the beginning of her second week:

Maxine Walden: Oh, let’s see: I have found that when I practice PaB that sometimes I observe myself observing, sometimes I do find myself just being in a quiet way, and sometimes I find that my mind is so full that it is hard to focus beyond my immediate experience…not sure if that helps
Sky Szimmer: i would love to hear about maxine’s discoveries
Maxine Walden: not sure if discoveries but I also find that sometimes my attention is burdened by the noise of the moment and sometimes not; when not then my sense of space and spaciousness is much more vast.
Pema Pera: The main thing is not so much to note anything in particular, as to “stop” — like Steven Tainer has told us many times (Maxine, Sky often comes to Steven’s classes in RL)
Maxine Walden: the notion of encumbered and unencumbered attention seems to be key in terms of my experience within the several seconds of the PaB
Pema Pera: And the more we stop the more we notice
Pema Pera: yes Maxine well put!!

On April 11 at the 1:00 session, Stim appears at PaB for the first time. There is no record of the conversation. The first recorded conversation is a discussion between Riddle and Stim about the awareness exercises of PaB and QWAQ. Some of the participants are meeting with Steven in QWAQ in between the sessions in PaB.

4/14 - Maxine Pema Fred and visitor - Maxine's dream association child drowning with her feeling swamped

The groups are generally small in this month, the conversations right on subject, the participants very frank about their experiences.

On April 28, Pema sent out an email to seven of the regular attendees, inviting each of them to be guardian at one session a week. All seven accepted. The original seven were Storm, Dakini, Sky, Genesis, Caledonia, Solobill and Maxine. Each would take one day a week starting on Monday May 5.

 

That afternoon, some of us got together an hour early, in preparation for the new schedule, starting next week. The idea was to spread out from three to four meetings a day, now including the night shift as well. Given that I would be awake during the SLT night, while in Japan, it would be natural for me to take the 1 am, 7 am, and 7 pm shifts. The afternoon shift, at 1 pm, would be at 5 am in Japan, so I will happily leave that to others.

To fill the afternoon slot, seven regular participants had volunteered to each take responsibility for one day of the week. During that day the person responsible would act as a kind of greeter, making sure no one would come to an empty tea house between 1:00 pm and 1:30 pm, SLT. And instead of greeter, we had dreamt up a better term: guardian, guarding the mid-day time in the heat house. Each guardian had agreed to either be there on his or her day, or else to make sure someone else would be there, in case he or she would have a conflicting schedule.

Storm had come up with a few alternative naming for the days, depending on who would be on duty, and I added a few more names to the list, so that we wound up with the following new names for the seven days of the week, starting with Monday (our new schedule will start on Monday, 5/5): Skyday, Genday, Calday, Stormday, Soloday, Dakday and Maxday.

The new google group was created on April 30.

Stim Morane also joined as a guardian at the end of the month.