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Peter,
I thought that was a terrific and accurate description. I am that too. Resistance is a good word, to me it describes what the consolidating tendency of the self is doing while engaged in some of its activities at various levels that are not immediately apparent. It is resisting an open focus by narrowing it. This may sound like a silly example, but my wife gave me gourmet jellybeans for Valentines Day, the kind that have dozens of assorted flavors. So I noticed chewing one, focusing and identifying the flavor as I turned it over on my tongue enjoying the sweet, specific taste, but before I finished it I caught myself picking up another one to pop into my mouth. I hadn’t even allowed the fullness of the first jellybean experience to arise and reveal before something in me was ready to discard the experience and take up a new one. The jellybeans of my life, my moments :-0 were being eaten up too fast by a tendency in me to move on.
On LOK pp. 170-1 there are five activities the self engages in as it tends to consolidate experience. It’s hard to imagine a time in my life when these activities are not going on at some level and they are hard to resist, yet there are times when, as Jack said, they can ‘hide’ and ‘there can be different levels of how we become aware of the flow of time’. When I’m not naming the flavor of the jellybean or comparing to other remembered flavors and judging my favorite, when I’m not describing the tasting activity to myself, when I am not the one who is the ‘owner’ of the taste, then what is there? Sometimes there is a sense of it even though it doesn’t seem to be an it, a point of transition.
Best wishes
David
Thank you, David.
Peter.