Looking at the posts this week, I notice a thread in most of them, a focus on one moment shifting into the next, drops of rain merging, puppies asking, “what’s next?” Karin, too, in her post (written in German) asks whether the witness is the same when the content has shifted? If it’s a new witness, how can it be a witness at all. Karin also writes that when this kind of observation proves too difficult, a focus on the breath is grounding. I have no doubt that Hayward would agree. Grounding us back into what, I wonder?
Michael’s citation of Kafka (“a bird went looking for a cage”) makes me wonder: do we look for a cage so that we don’t have to face the freedom to fly? Do we perhaps imagine that without a cage, we could no longer sing? Kafka has a long (for him) story about Josephine, the last of the mouse singers. She sings, but she doesn’t sing very well. But the other mice accept her, and even find comfort in her pitiful squeaks.
Jack
Hi Jack
Re:In what does an attention to breath ground us?
This becomes a matter of attribution.
If we attribute to breath an open, spacious enlivening dimension,
then returning to breath can help thaw the frozen, fixed experience of the self and situation being “a certain way”
Hayward
Hi Jack,
Not sure where else to note this detail: your orientation notes for week 6 (for which, many thanks) refer to chapters 20 & 21 in paragraphs two and three, but I’m pretty sure you actually intend to reference chapters 21 & 22. Your first and last paragraphs are the only other places which cite chapters by chapter number, and I believe those references are what you intend.–Michael
do we look for a cage so that we don’t have to face the freedom to fly?
hey Jack…I think that is it exactly…with freedom comes great responsibility…all that flapping and all…to much work maybe…let someone else do it…
hmmm…the fear might be that maybe there would no longer be a need or purpose for the singing???
this witness has me bugged a bit…i mean…it lacks the embodiment of being, and suggest that it only sees…is the witness…that has an incomplete feel to me…