During the phone call today, we were asked to strip away the sense that experience was “my experience,” if possible. Perhaps I was more successful at that than I had realized, because when I tried to share my experience, I was spoken over twice and did not “show up” on the call as an acknowledged voice! :-) During the exercise, I first just tried to feel into the experience of being the owner of experience, or of experience being “owned.” Once I noticed it, suddenly it became what might be described as another object in the field. It was “alongside” other objects of awareness and, for that moment at least, did not seem to have any special “position” or right to ownership. After a time, though, I found myself, through thought, appropriating that experience, making it mine. Ownership seems, on that level, to be an act of appropriation.
Best wishes,
Bruce
Like raindrops on a windowpane, joining together to form a small stream. Who is appropriating whom?
Nice metaphor. And appropriate, because the drops often don’t stand still long enough for you to identify the “agent” of appropriation and have the label stick. By the time you’ve finished your sentence, the flow has moved on and the timedrops have already gone through multiple transformations.
Or am I appropriating a phrase or two from what you wrote, in order to fuel my own rap?
Possibly, yes; it appears that way. And why not? Feel free.
And from that we can have the refreshing experience of not being condemned to have our own tedious, repetitive minds always be at the center!
Ha ha, yes, it’s nice to step aside from time to time and let other tedious, repetitive minds have their day in the sun.
Just kidding! :-P Seriously, I don’t often find others’ minds, or my mind, all that tedious; when I do, often it is just the quality of my present attention that is weak or not appreciatively attuned.
Best wishes,
B.
Like raindrops on a windowpane, joining together to form a small stream. Who is appropriating whom? Is this comment flowing into your longer, more considered post, with it’s references to a shared phone call and technology’s ability to exile anyone at any time? Or am I appropriating a phrase or two from what you wrote, in order to fuel my own rap? Yours is in the past, mine is in the present–does that make what I am writing now central, since the present is our only foothold within the stream of linear time? Isn’t it great to learn that we don’t always have to be at the center? The wisdom traditions teach us that other people have things to reveal, which are more reliable than anything we can independently generate. And from that we can have the refreshing experience of not being condemned to have our own tedious, repetitive minds always be at the center! –Michael