If we focus on a particular interval between points A and Al, we find that there is a moment of transition—’X’—that cannot ordinarily be directly observed and thus remains unknown.
Listen and see at the same time: in the ‘same’ moment.
For a very long time I preferred to sit in silence and simply observe, but lately I seem to warm to the sound of music. The connection of the listening field with the visual, and other sense fields, has been fascinating to experience. Music in various tempos and styles, ‘colors‘ experience, it provides feeling-tones that exert subtle influences that affect the way thought changes to other thoughts. The feeling-tone can have a subtle sway and affect a ‘transition‘, often well below what is apparent to my normal attentiveness to linear proceedings.
Calmly sitting and listening to a ‘soothing‘ classical piece, I was looking at the wind ruffling tree branches on a bank of evergreens. The movement was mesmerizing, and I was carried along by the beauty of the sounds, the lilt and sway of the strings and reeds, merging with the swaying branches and green pine needles. There was no discursive thought, no narrator announcing what was being presented, even judgment about beauty, value or comparisons seemed to recede from awareness. There was no ‘doing‘ that could be pointed to, just an unconnected purity of arising, listening space and viewing space had evolved to one awareness.
At some point, uninvolved awareness became gradually occluded by embodied feeling of Iam, and the sense of place and identity exerted its gravitational tug on focus. And I remembered what I might describe as levels that I seemed to plumb and then surface from.
If interested, I describe this awareness of levels and witnessing in a previous post about the process of painting watercolors a while back entitled: Week 9 – TSK Ex. 26 – Transcendence of Pointings …
David,
Reading your post a question arises to me: how far awareness can go to include more layers, levels and focal points?
It is connected to our way of being for sure.
I remembered a text in a book describing the experience of a frog that can see only shadows and identify its food (flies) by their movement. If many dead flies were near the frog it couldn´t see and remain hungry.
So our experience is connected with our way of knowing, our way of being. This is very impressive to me.