The Disowning tension exercise suggests that we “focus on the self as part of the ‘given’ content of the situation”. I quite often find myself doing this in the midst of an activity or social situation – I actually find I am watching this ‘self’ in action, in interactions, where the ego comes into play prominently. However, even while doing this, I still identify something separate from the ego-mind, doing the observation, and I have to ask “Who is it that is doing the observing? What entity is the observer?” Page 27 of When it rains… talks about experience “before ideas, before ownership, before the patterns of the mind” but I do not currently relate fully to experience without ‘the Observer’.
For me, I guess the closest I get to moving beyond the “self” altogether, in all its forms, is within what I would call a “Flow” situation (a concept I was struck by when quoted from a book in a recent lecture I attended on the subject of Music and spirituality). When I find myself one with the ‘flow’ of a situation or activity, with total involvement in it, then I find that ” the situation/activity is doing itself” (just as Rinpoche states – “the Kum Nye does itself”). Within this, the sense of ego seems to be dissolved altogether. However, whilst the ego seems to “go missing”, if only ever so briefly,I’m not confident that the “individual consciousness” (ahamkara in classical yoga termoinology) is also absent. I’ve still got a lot of work to do on that question.
I find that the best way to start such a process is to switch awareness from ‘content’ to ‘process’ by removing my preoccupation with the self-interested aspects of a situation. The ‘ego self’ then seems to become just one more player in the interaction, and the material world becomes more open and transparent. Without any ‘content’ agenda to push, tension dissolves. I guess this is what is described in the LOK passage on page xli as “knowledge which does not depend on taking one position or rejecting another”.
Gaynor
Gaynor,
I think you’re right to make a distinction between the self who takes the position of observer (as in social situations) and the practice of exercise 5, which would call for also ‘disowning’ the observer self. And I also agree that a focus on process helps. In other words, to over-simplify, when the sense of self as the owner of the experience of observing appears in experience, you can accept that sense as a part of the experience.