Written April 8, 2013, but only just discovered on September 17, 2014 – I don’t think I finished it, so didn’t post, but it’s a nice record, so I’m posting it now.
Everything’s still percolating, permeating. The mind keeps trying to ‘own’ the experience that is now memory, imaginary. I still don’t entirely know what the experience was – was it ‘Awakening’? I’ll know at some point in the future, but there is certainly a change. Mainly in perception.
There’s what can only be described as an oscillation between ‘sitting in being’, and ‘being Paul’. All of this is of course ‘beingness’. Even when the beingness is forgotten, and the Paulness is identified with, it’s still beingness that is ‘being Paul’. What’s different now is that it is much, much easier to catch/recognise the identification when it happens, and as a result, the identification seems to be happening less. I know now for real – not just because of a concept that I read in a book – that the character that I call Paul is simply a construct, purely imaginary. As a result, the constructs that form the identification, the movement-away-from-what-is that seems to define Paul in some way, are much clearer, more obvious – Paul doesn’t seem to be as able to get away with stuff at the moment.
I’m not ‘awake’. This Paul character can’t possibly be awake – Paul is being lived by Awakeness. When attention is given to this awakeness, it’s deep – an almost touchable thick silence which holds everything that arises. From here, sitting in being, objects are noticed, thoughts, sounds, movement – yet they are noticed as arising in what I am. If the mind tries to get a grip on how this might be possible, it falls over, turns it into objects which don’t seem to be able to grasp the fullness of what’s being experienced. I don’t know how this can be arising as and within ‘me’ (big me), I really feel the metaphor of the goldfish not being able to see the water it’s swimming in – it feels like the same thing.
There’s a hint at how much more there is to surrender to, to allow into knowingness, but this desperate impatience to ‘see’ seems to be gone. Blessed relief. Now it’s replaced by a wonder, full of curiosity, and a real willingness to really inquire into what is. Into what THIS is.
Up until now, I can see that I’ve been attempting Self Inquiry with the mind, which was the thing that could not ever ‘get’ what it was looking for, or looking with. Inquiring from Being seems to happen spontaneously and naturally. Awareness freely experiencing life as Paul.