30Sep14 Metta Practice : The MindRe-evaluation of Practice:While this website was down my practice also faltered due to a severe upset I gave myself, which looking back on it I am embarrassed to even talk about it because I really let my thoughts run away with me on that one. However, a small victory which I attribute to being more practiced with my technique for de-stressing.
So, I created an importance of aesthetics (which I felt was what the upset was about in general and which I know is part of my Dukkha i.e., 'case') and kept putting it all around me until I could expand out my viewpoint, look at my sacred cows and make the decision that being complementary with the being is more joy for me than thirsting for aesthetic sensations (and then getting disappointed and allowing myself to experience pain).
Following on the heels of that upset was my biggie boogieman which is well scripted out in excruciating detail in my mind and I always succumb to it, thinking it is a real scenario (probably something from the past that I'm projecting into a future -- of my own creation nonetheless, ha!). As usual, this one had me almost unconscious but this time - a small win for me - I managed to handle it fairly quickly so as not to prolong the agony. My partner, being intuitive, also felt these energies alongside me and we each had to go to our corners and work it through. He has his own dukkha and his own practices that get him through.
What brought me out of the mental mock-up of total loss of everything was to run on myself, "I must know [my partner]/I must not know [my partner]. Since the 4 years we have been striving together to null our fixed and opposing outlooks on life we have made great progress and now the fears are only of the mind and no longer a plausible reality due to behavior changes brought about by our devotion to our individual practices. However, the dragon, even though perhaps dead, still swings its tail -- now about every two weeks at most.
While I kept repeating to myself, "I must not know [my partner]" many images, thoughts, emotions, other phenomenon kept coming up and finally I did see how silly it is for me to "must know" anyone, especially now that I am more confident in my solo practices and what they can do for me. Losses from the past got looked at again and then put back into the past where they belong. I ended this side of the repeat practice once I expanded my viewpoint outside of my body and was above the property looking down on everything and felt very free of my mind. Then, to keep the balance, I ran on myself "I must know [my partner] which brought up positive images -- stuck in past pleasure moments, trying to re-create the past -- and those also faded away in importance.
Since Daniel works in ER I guess he would understand this as an emergency handling so that one can get back into their normal stream of life once again. It worked quite well and now back to the REALLY IMPORTANT issues -- how is my practice going?
I have been re-evaluating the emphasis of my practice and have decided to shift emphasis over to doing more Direct Looking -- what I also call time-breaking -- and my Lester Levenson inspired Metta Practice has been a first stage success -- sort of a Life Repair. But Lester's bridge to Nirvana has been incorporated and upgraded into Dennis' 5 levels of progress towards vanishing the mind, i.e., "nirvana". I see this as a Tao-Buddhist approach -- that is how I see myself.
Self-to-self: continue developing proficiency and quickness of the complementary and necessary "Repair of Importances" exercises and then move immediately into the activity of exercising myself to consciously bring incidents from the past into the present, comparing differences and similarities until no more change, and then putting them back into the past again, being very watchful to keep the mind topped up with importances so that it does not fill in the vacuum with its own stuff (I love that word). Dennis says this is the exercise that separates the men from the boys and I can already see why he said that. It has already felt like a baptism by fire when I first tried it out and I quickly retreated to only time-breaking the day's events.
This Level will be complete when I can no longer find an incident in my past with any energy or fixed attention.
The key to success is gradient approach and I am still going to allow myself to be weak-kneed and only scan out the day's events. And let's see what develops after that; afterall, this is a native ability of any being -- one which I have spent eons perfecting the art of forgetting (not-knowing). Art, in that I loved creating thick velvety blacknesses to hide everything from view, and bright hard black obsidian shields, and clear crystalline spheres all around me -- it's funny how these things stuck with me and I was no longer conscious of them. Just a normal operating procedure placed on automatic mode -- don't you just love being able to put things on automatic? But what if you decide you want to play a different game or expand your horizons -- well, these creations just might not be what is wanted now. They certainly would not contribute to the activity of vanishing the mind. I'm going to leave them alone for now -- it will all come undone in its due time.
One thing I liked about Nisargadatta was that he believed what his Master said and never for once doubted his Master, and he attributed that trust to his success with his practices. In that vein I've decided to drop all doubts about Dennis' advised practices and do them until the end. My only R&D into clearing techniques is in seeing how best I can help others resolve their own stated mental issues.
A Funny Story taken from a past existence - for entertainment only : Long ago, on a distant planet, in a large city, a group of us were being taught how to lift our bodies into the air and fly around. I was a slow student and when they asked me to jump off a skyscraper I declined and so I was sent to a room with the other decliners and we all lay on our backs on a large platform and did some prescribed exercises for the mind until we had cleared out the mental blocks for flight. It worked and when I came to this planet and started spending lifetimes here, one of my lifetimes I was called "girl who flies through our hair" in an Indian tribe in early North American continent (still had saber-tooths), and later in India where I did a refresher course in Yogic flying -- still very compulsively trying to create effects on others, so not very wise about the use of this ability, and that got me into enough trouble to where today I have a firm sub-command not to ever do that again. More accurately, it is probably hanging up in the mind as a "must fly/must not fly", etc.
Start of RI exercise : "Create something and put it all around you"[Note: since in reality we are constantly mocking-up our holographic reality it is easy enough to conclude whatever is in our current mocked-up environment is of importance, so anything in the environment is game to be the subject of this exercise. I generally choose something related to my fixation on the importance of life postulating itself as part of our postulated biosphere, esp. plants. Life is hierarchical and this universe is nothing but life and postulates.]An apple tree:- yawns, emotions, thoughts -- lots of thoughts - and images, almost overwhelming -- I must have been a bio-engineer in some other existence!
- I would never have suspected that a simple apple tree would produce so much change within my psyche.
- Unlike most humans, fruit trees actually wish to be desirable to be eaten -- within parameters set by it
- Its diversity is a way of knowing how best to be known (sic, eaten) by as many as possible (appealing to all possible tastes)
- timebreaking an incident that came up from the distant past - yawns
gotta get to work - to be continued