{"id":957,"date":"2009-03-10T11:44:17","date_gmt":"2009-03-10T18:44:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cciforum.dreamhosters.com\/2009\/03\/10\/the-cycle-of-seeing\/"},"modified":"2021-01-09T12:32:08","modified_gmt":"2021-01-09T20:32:08","slug":"the-cycle-of-seeing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cciforum.dreamhosters.com\/?p=957","title":{"rendered":"Week 9 — The Cycle of Seeing"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photo courtesy of: \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcConstellations\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 – Pixabay
https:\/\/tinyurl.com\/y7nynxlx
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The Cycle of Seeing<\/em> exercise demonstrated for me, many of the elements we’ve been learning for the past seventeen or so weeks. Selecting the ten ‘things’<\/em> put a focus on how I model<\/em> experience to ‘short-hand<\/em>‘ each ‘thing’<\/em> from a countless selection of choices in order to refine and easily understand and recall them. I also saw how I construct stories by constructing the linear list of ‘things’<\/em>, and then spinning<\/em> it, the way I spin my daily stories of identification, desire, and worry… from waking till falling asleep at night. Working with the exercise actually creates the space and sub-spaces in which to construct the context of the ten ‘things’<\/em>, a spinning world that I cycle over and over — as the phrase comes to mind, “To see the world in a grain of sand<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

As I continued over days spinning this micro-cosmos of ten ‘things’<\/em> more fascinating effects happened. While I didn’t see a ‘self’<\/em> manipulating the creation of the ‘things’<\/em>, I did feel the presence of the narrator<\/em>, controlling the process of gathering, organizing, deciding, valuing, discarding, and the interpreter<\/em> by setting up a distance between itself and the ‘things’<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0And the distance was actually felt as a tension, a gravity of ‘will’<\/em> holding the things together made out of a value system I seemed to have set up in advance without fully understanding the consequences of doing so.\u00c2\u00a0Such tight control was maintained until I got good at spinning, and I got sort of cocky about how easy it was, and then something extraordinary happened… As if through a magnifying glass, I saw deeper into how I structured my whirling world.<\/p>\n

The value scale I used in choosing my ‘things’ was; good<\/u> equaled ‘easy to recall,<\/em>‘ and bad<\/u> equaled ‘hard to recall<\/em>.’ So I always chose easy over hard. Every choice based on that value system called the subject-self into play from a predetermined perspective.\u00c2\u00a0I saw that my value judgments were ‘self-assumed<\/em>‘; they were presuppositions that not only defined but limited my ‘seeing’<\/em> of the ‘things<\/em>.’\u00c2\u00a0My initial unquestioned attitude about what was good or bad kept me in a repetitive one-dimensional tunnel-vision, sifting through models, like mental photographs. And this was essentially a flat, spiraling world or context, which seemed to keep my focus confined to boundaries of my own making. For example, when I chose to remember my puppy as one of my 10 things, I chose a photo of her, not a nebulous memory of her. It was easy to recall a very specific, frozen<\/em>, picture. But to just recall her by name would have brought all kinds of images to chose from. Way too many to consider. I had to simplify, or ‘summarize<\/em>‘ her as a ‘thing’. It dawned on me how I summarize my experience all the time in order to manage memories.<\/p>\n

As I said, I got better at cycling and remembering the ten ‘things’<\/em> and visualizing their detail, and so my tight control seemed to ease up.\u00c2\u00a0As I kept spinning the ‘things’<\/em>, and relaxing control, suddenly, I lost the subjective perspective, I forgot ‘me’<\/em> and seemed to become the ‘thing’<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0The value system in place dissolved, the constructed nature of the ‘thing’<\/em> seemed to ‘deconstruct’<\/em> the values, while at the same time retain its objectness.\u00c2\u00a0All of a sudden distance and gravity dissolved, there was tremendous freedom and a sense of expansion or opening as I became free to be all I knew of the thing, in a more full and richer way… the ‘things<\/em>‘ and I were one, we were made or put together out of the same stuff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Cycle of Seeing exercise demonstrated for me, many of the elements we’ve been learning for the past seventeen or so weeks. Selecting the ten ‘things’ put a focus on how I model experience to ‘short-hand‘ each ‘thing’ from a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[136,1,30,42,51,107,74,70,78,69,103],"tags":[169,42,85,115,69],"class_list":["post-957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-01-general-tsk-discussions","category-01_general","category-tsk-online-fall-2008winter-2009","category-inquiry","category-knowledge","category-process","category-self","category-space","category-thought","category-time","category-visualization","tag-higher-knowing","tag-inquiry","tag-memory","tag-opening","tag-time"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cciforum.dreamhosters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cciforum.dreamhosters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cciforum.dreamhosters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cciforum.dreamhosters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cciforum.dreamhosters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cciforum.dreamhosters.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cciforum.dreamhosters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cciforum.dreamhosters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cciforum.dreamhosters.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}