Week 4 Notes: Expanding Layers of Mind

On a break at work today, I took a walk around the office building in the blustery October weather.  The clouds were grey and billowing, gathering threateningly overhead; the gusts of wind carried faint traces of moisture that braced the skin of my face.  As I walked mindfully around my familiar circuit, allowing my eyes to rove over the shifting autumn landscape, I noted the subtle movements of my thought, and the faint underlying sense of joy that was stirring in my chest.  Breathing with the gusts of wind, I expanded the feeling of joy until I had the sense of it filling my body, and spreading just beyond.  My thoughts grew still for a moment in this widened field.

As I continued walking, I noticed the sense of being “positioned” in my eyes — as if that was where my knowing self was centered, looking out on the world, looking in on myself.  I could feel how my current sense of identity, of being an observer, was anchored in these sensations.  Feeling into this contraction, I expanded it outward, imagining and “feeling” it merge with the sky and the space all around me.  As I did this, I felt a shift in my relation to the objects around me.  The rigid “relationship” between my observing self (in my head, around my eyes) and a tree before me dissolved, and “relation” itself became subtler; there was “knowing” or “experience,” a particular experiential field, but the sense of being divided within it, or over against it, had dissolved. 

 

The feeling of being centered in my eyes or in the upper portion of my body would return on occasion, and whenever I noticed this, I would again expand the sensation outward, like a circle of rippling water spreading out to encompass the lake of my sensory field.  Eventually, both the point of contraction and the expanded circle seemed to be present together, cancelling each other out (in terms of either being “ultimate”).  After a time, I found that the expanded circle itself had a sort of “fixed” quality, with its own boundaries, and so I expanded this as well.  The first expansions had set up an alternative, wider frame, but there was a subtle stuckness and dullness to it.  When I began to expand and open this as well, there was a more powerful sense of decentering that, at the same time, seemed like a “bright ordinariness.”  I don’t know how else to put it.  Contractions, whenever noted, just rippled outward automatically, and I walked in a simple freshness.