The practice for this week invites to investigate the movement of time from moment to moment in my experience.
When I listen to a continuous sound as it took place in one moment I have to focus my awareness, to make contact with this sound, let it pervade my awareness in a way that no transition or change is happening. If I became distracted and other things are included, the change occupies the experience and the one moment dissolves. In this kind of experience there is a tension when I try to exclude other things. For example: I am focusing in the continuous sound of the air conditioning, but there is the sound of the neighbor refurbishing his apartment, and there is also the sound of a saw happening.
In the above experience it seems like the self is controlling the experience and for this reason it is limited and tense.
Otherwise, if I listen to both sounds and also include the view of the room I am writing this assignment and what I am feeling right now, my awareness works to include more than one focus. In this case it seems that the experience is less tense. The control of the self is diluted and a more alive and flowing experience takes place. When I looked for the transition, it was difficult to find. It looks like different rhythms happening together.
If I try to refer to a new experience that arises back to the moment before, I have to freeze and to narrow the experience. Referring to the moment when the saw of the neighbor began to make noise, I had to use “my†awareness to connect the moment before and after the saw, the moment it began to bother me.
The link between past, present and future depends on this “I amâ€, which binds together moments in time and patters human affairs. LOK 179
When timing does not insist on the link of sequential flow or going TSK 151, all points become accessible TSK 155, and infinite possibilities open, based on intense intimacy. TSK 159.
Good morning, Eliana,
I appreciate your report on how you have practiced with a whole range of the “variations”, looking at and between moments. You inspired me to write something about how difficult I find these practices and to notice that I don’t have your ability to keep trying in the face of the distractions that seem to accompany this kind of effort. I had a different response to “a new experience that arises–(looking) back to the moment before”. You found that this narrowed the experience. I found that it gave me a feeling that I didn’t have to try so hard to find moments because all moments float like rafts on a kind of time which is always there and without which we could not have the experience of being in a moment. But I think I tend to slide off into my own narrative whenever anything too challenging presents itself, and I admire your perserverance.
Speaking of space, I was interested to hear you say that you were listening to you “air-conditioner”. North of the equator, we have our propane stoves and natural gas furnaces running pretty high in many parts of America.
Michael G