While I was walking to the supermarket I used my awareness like a radar to investigate what makes reality real.
Walking with strong steps, feeling, remembering the list of things I had to buy. Seeing how important is awareness, and how fickle it is. Loosing what was happening around me when I glued my awareness in my thoughts.
I tried to swallow the experience, the sound the cars, the hot climate, the coolness of the orange ice cream. Then I saw a young boy listening to music in a Walkman and I wondered which music he was listening, I didn´t know which was his reality, what he was thinking or feeling.
I didn´t know the reality of the people that was passing by inside the cars, the reality of people walking in the street. I only could perceive the “reality†that was within the reach of my awareness.
I didn´t know all the details of the space around me: The height and color of the buildings, the speed of the cars, just an overview. And then I remembered a movie: “The Inception†about entering the dream reality. They said in that movie that you just need a few elements of reality and then your mind fills the rest with what you already know. In this movie it was said that a thought deep rooted in our mind can define or destroy us. And then I realize how repetitive thoughts sometimes limit possibilities, narrowing our view so that we cannot see a way out.
Is this reality like a dream? Or is it a mixture of everybody´s awareness? Or yet, a mixture of everybody awareness filled with what they already know, impregnated with their past, their memories, their thoughts. A reality pervaded with everybody´s models. A reality confirming what we keep repeating to ourselves.
So what is new, what is really changing? Can awareness expand out of the reach our own stories and models? It is definitively a possibility.
Eliana, Thank you for your very interesting post, that helped me to finally break out of my resistance to write, since our TSK course started.
My awareness of MY awareness is that it is not mine. Awareness is just awareness, universal awareness, in which ALL of what we call time, space and knowledge; everything visible and invisible, visible physical things, non-physical things, palpable and non-palpable things, people, other living beings, thoughts, past, present and future, – everything – is totally and absolutely interconnected. The experience that I have is that we live completely UNAWARE of this nature of AWARENESS and pass our lives unnecessarily limiting ourselves to interacting with just a tiny part of it. Unnecessarily, because in fact, as the TSK approach can eventually show us, we actually are constantly in touch with the whole of AWARENESS, even if we don’t notice it.
My experience, when I manage to open up just a little, through studying TSK, practicing TSK exercises, teaching and coaching people with Transforming Stress into Well Being (one of the Nyingma Skillful Means courses) and practicing it myself and, above all, “rubbing out” words and concepts as much as possible from my mind and experience when and while doing these practices and activities, is that what we call “serendipity” starts to bubble up with remakable frequency and strength. My reading of serendipity experiences is that they are small samples of the always-available infinite awareness. And we have an infinite number of radars constantly connected and pointed in all directions , or perhaps just one that works in all directions and all dimensions simultaneously, even if we don’t pat any attention the to information being picked up by this (these) radar(s).
Doing the exercise KTS pp188-189 Partitions and Occupancy I am having the following experience: first the object seems to glow at its edge with “space”, then I get involved with its colours and textures, then my mind focuses on microtextures and the known but invisible interchange of atoms and molecules going on at the interface of the object with the “space” around it (actually filled with invisble but very palpable air – just move your hand backwards and forwards in the apparent “space” to feel that it is full of something physical, although not visible). Then, at some point, as I continue probing and investigating, a point arrives at which I get a sudden strong feeling of being sucked towards and into the object, like gravity, to become a part of it, which I am beginning to understand is in some very TSK way perhaps is what is going on. This works with objects as diverse as the TV, the orchid on the table, the trees waving in the wind outside the window, and even thoughts.
Hi Eliana,
Your post “Witnessing Reality” expresses a thought-engaging range of the things we humans go through trying to make sense of it all.
Does our sense of inhabiting a reality come from our perceptions, from a bubbling pot full of all the thoughts and emotions contributed by living beings everywhere, or is it a paint-by-numbers creation filled in by our individual minds because we cannot bear to live with ambiguity or with phenomena which we cannot label and file away? Or is it all a dream for which any rational explanation would be irrelevant.
Your questions are a good preparation for the new material in KTS, which introduces the idea of a “field” (although it seems that the phrase “field communique” had to wait 4 years for the publication of DTS).
The image of a field is a wonderful way to bring together all the questions that arose during your shopping trip. A field leaves room for everything that we notice as well as ourselves noticing it. And just as a field welcomes the seeds dropped by a bird flying high overhead, it seems reasonable to speculate that in the field we share with other living beings, we can contact the energies of everyone we could ever meet, or not meet.
–Michael