Archive for August, 2009
Experience is Binding
“Experience is binding” - Bob Cergol
You watch a movie, then notice the next day while you’re working, the movie has your inner movie working along trying to hash it out. The experience of watching the movie is taken by the mind as being real and therefore has to be worked out as if it happened. This is just like working four or five hard shifts, and then taking two days off for the mind to quiet down and process the mess. The experience is binding. If you are the type with a very strong personality and mind that are outward oriented, you never get a break from it, you try to still control it all, so that you can win. This means that the experience is binding to you and you can’t drop it.
The last statement shows why isolations, times spent alone, are so important. If you spend enough time out of pressing experiences, the inner movie starts to die down and you get a little breathing room. This could scare you half to death if you’re the type that’s identified with the inner movie, it would feel as if you’re losing your rich inner life. You don’t want quiet or stillness because that threatens that sense of self, or the self as it is and relates to the ego identified with the inner movie. If you sit long enough in the quiet, this sense of self gets threatened, you want to rush back into experience in order to regain that feeling of self, of life from drama.
Today’s social networking provides a sense of self to many, keeping Facebook and Twitter in business. It provides an effective escape from fear of loss of self, and sadly, from facing the Truth about what we really are. Isolations are important because they show us this inner movie, and the broad extent of its power over us. Quiet time spent alone reveals our inner self through the process of allowing the play and drama of modern life and its character-self to wind down.
quiet time alone
The process of contracting the attention to improve reception, followed by a period of relaxation for it all to bring fruit:
We have to have a contraction of our attention from the manifested world, to save our energy and create an aim and direction; simplify our life. But at some point the danger is this contraction could become the search in itself and an end in itself rather than just part of the means. The contraction has to be given up(actually, it’s removed) for a total relaxation, once the contraction has done its work. In other words, once we find that thinking and planning and doing in our practice have come to a dead end, then we have to give it up once we’ve hit the wall beyond which our mind cannot go, and allow the inner relaxation, so that we can receive.
First, we contract or withdraw our energy and attention to make the machine efficient and gain a vector and direction to get surely headed in the right way. Then, at some point there has to be complete inner relaxation, because the contraction of itself can’t give us the answer, the answer has to come from within through the relaxation. We get out of our own way. We must allow ourselves to receive, once we have improved the receiving mechanism: the intuition.
Hello Everyone!
Posted by mysticmi in Uncategorized on August 17, 2009
Welcome to the first post of the Mystic Missal blog.
I’ve decided to gather up whatever brain cells remain, and enter the wild world of blogging. I’ll be posting thoughts and photos every few days, and hope to generate interest and inquiry along the lines of self-discovery.
As soon as the next Missal Newsletter comes out, hopefully this Friday, I’ll post some musing along the lines of inquiring minds.
Thanks
Bob Fergeson
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The Listening Attention
The Listening Attention is our innate ability to observe the world and ourselves without identification.The essays, poetry and insight from the Listening Attention web site are now available in book form.$10 including shipping and handling:
