10/01/12
Mornings have become easier, there's more of an instant "ping" when waking up and for the last few days I've almost sprung up to my feet. Applying Daniel's suggestion from the Hurricane Ranch tapes to see things as if you're on vacation is a great way to work and I thoroughly recommend it if you haven't already tried it. The whole j'amais vous thing that Richard talks about becomes much more readily experienced with it, and combined with simply paying attention to what it is to experience the senses as they do what they do it's a really nice way to go about your day.
While sitting in work, the sunlight shone across the screen of the computer and revealed that wonderful purity for a few minutes before things went back to being just generally pretty good. There's a constant but subtle sense of things just happening by themselves, that's not meant as some sort of claim in terms of where I think I'm at with this thing, but over the last two or three weeks there's been a lot of more noticeable changes in normally mundane things e.g. washing my hands is sometimes like a symphony of pure sensations, putting them under the hand dryer in work is great fun too...and yes, it sounds like naive, stupid or childish but I honestly couldn't give a flying fuck.

To be attentive is to just simply be here, not to let mental objects or impersonal sensations drag "you" away with them. There's, what I'd describe as, a grasping for mental objects that happens when a thought comes up that leads to more of "me" arising through "my thoughts" about that object. Catching this as it happens and investigating what led to it happening is fun and stops it happening, this puts an end to a lot of really basic crap that fogs things up.
I was lying down last night just following the breath, sutta-style, and I can now differentiate more between what some have described as the "affective" pleasure, as in the vibratory overlay that happens, and the clearer, more bodily pleasure underlying it. Seeing how we add that mental aspect to it by reading it as being something I like weakens it, keeping doing it makes it go away but, so far at least, I haven't quite gotten the hang of stopping it entirely. Yet.
Then again, as I just said "yet", I know that there's is no such thing as a "yet" outside of my own mental conceptions of what that is, based on an idea about time existing, or how there's a "back" or a "forth" in anything really. Intellectually I know it's all happening right now, and even as my fingers dance rather crudely, and with a lot of retyping or deleting along the way, it makes perfect sense that this is it...but clearly
something hasn't quite clicked yet. Thankfully a friend who's done the whole AF thing suggested investigating intent or impulsion which has been really interesting so far, he also pointed to a few aspects of things that were really helpful in terms of understanding what's been done and what still needs to be looked at.
With that in mind, I was looking at intent closely today and have been quite surprised by some of what's been found. I learned, among other things, something about the impulse to control another person or to dominate a situation. I watched how my own behaviour changed in response to how people reacted or spoke to me and immediately questioned what it was that was causing that to happen. For example, I talk to people on a phone all day and I know a fair bit about how to do this job well (I also have a "cool voice" according to other people. Ha!). How to talk to people and how to turn situations around in often heated complaints involves a lot of subtle cues and non-verbal stuff, but I didn't quite realize how pervasive that mode of communication can be in normal life and how we're always trying to control things, or get something out of it for ourselves.
Anyway, I just realized what time it was and remembered I had something to do so I'll sign off. The adventure continues.