Awake: Chapter 16 Notes

inquiry, acceptance, and letting go

the chapter “Eight Contemporary Enlightenment Experiences by Japanese and Westerners.” The book was The Three Pillars of Zen by Roshi Phillip Kapleau

Highlighted so I could go find the book.

the first twenty-four years of life

, he was just a baby. It was about 53 for me. It's frustrating thinking that I'm going to find enlightenment right before I die. 😉

practice

I wrote “presence”, and I'm waffling about whether that's on target.

suffering is the match that lights the fire of awakening

I wrote: Don't think it has to be. I'm pretty happy, but I'm allso very curious… and there's project Better Dave.

But.. when I wrote this I was obviously looking at now and not the 50+ years of duhkha that spurred my eventual discovery of meditation and then Buddhist philosophy and philosophy in general.

My life wasn't horrible, but there was a lot of suffering, even if most of it was self-inflicted.

a little smile

Highlighted because I am a huge proponent of the little smile.

We often circumvent natural curiosity by moving our attention to a familiar but artificial mental construct when we find ourselves in the unknown. We do this to feel some sense of certainty. This means that when faced with the unknown, we often cling to old, habituated patterns of thinking to help us avoid admitting to ourselves that we really don’t know.

H w/o c.

One definition of empirical is, “verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or logic.” When conducting self-inquiry, it’s best to forego comparing your experience to any idealized experience or expectation. We’re here to discover. So any description we’ve read or heard about what is supposed to happen when we self-inquire is useless. We’re only interested in what we directly discover.

When we free ourselves from the bondage of the past

I think it was beside the point but I wrote: The past doesn't bind us, we bind ourselves.

I think that's a valid observation but it's nitpicking his point that we shouldn't be caught up in the past.

I also kind of hate the buzzwords in the second half of the sentence.

inner movie screen

Highlighted because of Mooji.

whatever images may come in the mind are just images on the screen of consciousness they do not affect you be like the screen on which images are projected if there is a huge fire on the screen, the screen is not burnt by it if there is a waterfall the screen will not be wet – Transcript excerpt from Mooji ♥ Nothing Here But You ◦ Guided Meditation
(quoted part is around 5:12)

You can consider the thought to be like a pad of paper with the message “I’m confused” written on it.

This is brilliant and should have been strewn through the entire book, especially that shit chapter on emotions.

Your thoughts and emotions should be viewed as if someone handed you a message with the thought or emotion on it. It happened so fast you didn't even see the person, maybe you just put your hand in your pocket and found a scrap of paper. Either way you wouldn't take the thought to be “you”, it's something that just appeared, it's not “you” or “yours” and you can take it's advice or not. The most important is probably that you pay attention. To what? Yes, exactly!

a looking that just keeps on going with no landing on anything solid or specific

This is the clue Sam Harris never gives us.

I'm blocked here by the idea that the camera can't take a picture of itself without a mirror. And now I'm reminded of the places where Angelo used the mirror analogy, and Sam used it the other day, and Mooji uses it in the same meditation where he mentions the movie screen.

The key is thoughtless looking-seeing-being. Neither rejecting thoughts nor getting entangled in their content. A pure movement of innocent curiosity. It might feel dynamic or it might feel quite still. Either is fine.

This is where I was this morning.

Part of it was noticing all the times when my body does things without me telling it to. Like typing now. I want to type a word and it happens. I don't tell it which muscle or for how long, I just intend to type. (Re-typing this I realized that my body knows how to spell.)

I brushed my teeth and as I my body was going to dry my face I noticed, and for a moment the universe was drying it's face and I was along for the ride.

Concluding needs context

H w/o c.

I think this is part of my issue and it's a great illustration of why you need more than one teacher. An in-person teacher might be able to read you and adapt, but a remote teacher, studied by book or video or podcast, can't adapt to you so you need more than one so that when one doesn't phrase it in a way that lands with you another will.

Angelo's talk about the “sense of me” connected. I'm intellectually hooked to the idea that there is no “me” in the conventional view. I need to move past that to the “sense of me” in my head, and coincidentally Sam mentioned it one of the daily meditations.

You can’t just make it disappear by adopting a belief that it doesn’t exist.

This is sort of me. As mentioned, I'm intellectually down with the idea of no-self, but I haven't had the experience of no-self. No, I think I have but it didn't register that way at the time.

here is an assumed, a felt “me,” that seems to be aware of that thought the moment it arises

H w/o c.

There will be effortless, brilliant clarity

Be careful that you don't want this.