More Notes on Layers of Mind

When I first started working with this exercise, I was a little thrown off by Jack’s description of things such as affective tone, state of mind, body sensations, etc, as “non-content.”  As soon as I noted them, they became “content” – points of focus, objects within space (others on the conference call noted that this was their experience as well).  But I didn’t reject Jack’s suggestion right away, even though it didn’t make complete sense to me; I kept an open mind and just kept practicing.  I’m still not sure if non-content is the best word, but as I continued to work with the exercise, I did find that the maintenance of an openness towards dimensions of my being as “non-content” had an interesting effect of simply relaxing some of my habitual orientation, allowing a not-knowing or a living “question” to sit at the heart of experience.

The title of the exercise is apt.  As I worked with it last week, making space for an awareness or acknowledgement of body, affect, state of mind, and background context or orientation in addition to the normal stream of thoughts and associations, I did sense – or, perhaps, enact – a fuller, more layered, but also more open field of experience…

But in addition to noting these layers, I sometimes shifted into a different sense of space and time, where everything seemed to have a virtual or thought-like quality.  For instance, at some point, I saw my experience unfolding in terms of a series of circles of concern, with “being in a TSK class” forming one large temporal frame, “being on a break at work” forming another, and “moving my body” and “experiencing what’s present” forming more immediate contexts.  The sense was not just of being an actor moving forward along a trajectory in a given span of space or time, but of experience emerging or taking shape as the “concrescence” of these circles of concern.  There was a virtual sense to this – as if the present was bubbling up in the center of a field of potential, being “enacted” in a sense by overlapping, multi-dimensional circles of concern which encompassed past and future, local and nonlocal spaces.  (I noticed the silence after my explanation of this on the phone call, so hopefully this is a clearer description!).

At other times, the experience was simpler, but still evoking a different sense of space – as when I took a walk today, and felt the movement of leaves as a part of me, as a delightful dancing of sensation, emotion, and light in the open, resonant field of my body.  I didn’t have a sense of expansion, as if I had “encompassed” the world; it was more like there was an overlapping of distinct but somehow virtual spaces.  I felt this movement as a subtle celebration and joy streamed very lightly through me.

(A fuller version of this account may be found on my blog, where I’m keeping notes on the experiences and questions arising from this class:  http://brucealderman.gaia.com/home/dh_hr278g/cciforum.dreamhosters.com/2008/10/deepening_layers_of_mind_week_two)