In addition to engaging this week’s homework whilst sitting quietly, I am holding it as a ‘background intention’ for the week. I realised this is a good example of Jack’s suggestion that we find ways to create practices from passages of text. This practice is a useful response to the question about how we always wind up ‘conducting sameness’.
The experience is of being poised on the edge of a revelation. At the same time a balance of ‘I can’t do this’ with a ‘yearning’ and a sense of something profound and new occurring. Even though I can’t see it, I know it’s there and know that just as a result of making the effort to reduce my inattention, and to live more finely, more of what Jack referred to as ‘the proliferation of possibilities’ (before they have been named or assigned locations) will make itself known.
There is another example (page 130) of a statement-question-exercise: “A way of knowing that could preserve the conducted as conducted could free us from the substance of the ‘happeneded’ and the confining patterns of our own lives. Can we act on this possibility? Is there a knowledge that will make available more directly what remains unformed in the temporal dynamic? Can we trace the secret workings of an appearing not shaped by the claim of being real?
Caroline
These are both profound! But for me, that first one …(a balance of ‘I can’t do this’ with a ‘yearning’ and a sense of something profound and new occurring. Even though I can’t see it, I know it’s there and know that just as a result of making the effort to reduce my inattention, and to live more finely, more of ‘the proliferation of possibilities’ will make itself known)… is well, so profound that I could wear that attitude like a suit. It fits so well, there’s room, it’s comfortable, I can walk around in it, live in it. It’s me! :-)
Great post.
David