Click to listen, more sound files throughout the content.  Cut 01 from Carmel Call:

Boxing and Asleep 01-Boxing and Asleep

What we commonly call a “mood” is a predisposition that is a result of the lack or excess of attention on one particular thing or level to the exclusion of another thing or level. (Either way, what we end up with is ignoring one’s deeper self.) Mood is the nature of the ground that the seed falls on.

Cut 02 from Carmel Call:  Check out Time  02-Check out time

The ground I’m referring to is “the way you are” to receive the results of a search. A search is the process we use when trying to make sense of or respond to anything. A search is composed of a beginning, a middle, and an end. It is diving deeply into ourselves, finding something, and then bringing that something back into our attention.

A search is roughly analogous to playing with a yo-yo. When you’re holding the yo-yo, it is within your focus of attention. Once you throw the yo-yo it begins the descent into who you really are, and at a certain point, your attention can’t go any further. And so the rest of the journey down into yourself, is done without any attention at all. Once the yo-yo reaches the end of the string, it reverses course and begins the return trip up where attention reappears just as it disappeared on the way down. (This often happens at very same point.) Because most people are unaware of all that goes on outside their attention, they mistakenly think they are privy to the entire search process; but they never are. The result this kind of search produces is based both on what it can find but is determined even more by the distortion in the reception it receives when it returns to the levels where attention can spin it.

Cut 03 from Carmel Call:  Searches  CC-09-01-09-03-Searches

On the Carmel Cluster Call, I asked Barry about his relationship with his twenty-something daughter. It’s what he did before he began to answer that is particularly relevant. He, as is predictable, went on a search—but he did so in a certain way. He began the search with a predisposition, a mood, not of newness nor of curiosity but of upset and melancholy.

Rather than discovering what his relationship with his daughter was, he chose to build a box first. In doing so, he limited his search; and because he has specific emotional responses to that limitation, these emotions appeared to be pointed toward his daughter. If you say to an Arab, “I have a Jew that I want you to meet”, it is possible (at least in many cases) that the Arab would bring a background interpretation to his or her response to the invitation. If you were to say to the Arab, “I am someone I want you to meet.” You would probably receive a different reaction. Barry, rather than creating his relationship with his daughter, determined (based on his own predispositions) what his relationship was.

Cut 04 from Carmel Call:  Another Search  04-Another Search

When asked about his daughter, Barry didn’t create anything…he reacted. He reacted in a particular, habituated way that appears to him as being safer than being open—but is a degree of closed. The seed of the question fell on ground that was only preferentially fertile. Barry maintains an other-than-conscious representation of how he would like his relationship to be with his daughter. (Moses supposes his toeses are roses.) He isn’t aware of how he wants his relationship with his daughter to be. That information resides at too deep a level for him to even doubt it.

In other words, the only way we can doubt something is if we know it is there. If we haven’t a clue…whatever it is, remains true.

Cut 05 from Carmel Call:  Game Begins  05-Game Begins

But Barry doesn’t stop there. On a slightly more shallow level, Barry thinks he knows what his relationship with his daughter is. (But Moses supposes erroneously.) First, Barry thinks (without attention) about what his relationship with his daughter is; then, on a more shallow level (but still without attention) he thinks he knows what it is. The gap between these two—how he imagines it could be and how he thinks it is—hurts. And this is the center of the conspiracy. These two representations are so different and so fully in disagreement that Barry must defend himself. So he does what nearly any educated American human will do: he thinks. He tries to fill the gap between these warring factions by coming up with answers to my simple question that defend and pretend that there is no gap. He also limits his search and, thereby, limits himself and causes suffering, constriction and maybe even bad breath.

Barry’s process of maintaining warring factions—while pretending (at least to himself and then to the world) that he isn’t—institutionalizes certain ways of approaching life. The two representations of his daughter mirror and metaphor two representations about life. He has an other-than-conscious representation of how life should be and he also thinks he knows how life is. These two are at odds and everything about Barry is a reaction to the war between these two irreconcilable aspects of his character.

Cut 06 from Carmel Call:  Dying Inbetween  06-dieing inbetween

These two, and their ability to disagree and not get along endlessly (thus far), conspire to make Barry who he is. Not who he really is, but who he is just below the surface…just below the level that he can attend to. Barry makes up all these interpretations, but he can’t enjoy creating them because he is not aware of doing so; they are his sole creations and have little or no root in any sort of reality. (For nobody’s toeses are posies of roses as Moses supposes his toeses to be.)

Everything Barry does is influenced by this mood: the result of every search, his experience of each moment, every action, reaction, and relation. He constantly limits himself, tries to control himself, and inhibits his “real” self. How? By reacting first and constantly to the existence and trauma of living in this gap. While we all miss almost everything almost all the time, Barry has a particular way of doing this—a particular mood that influences every thought he has, every breath he takes, and every moment of his life. There are many results of this process, such as: loss of relationship with his daughter, difficulty doing his job, and the constant conversation that life isn’t as it should be. But the most consistent result is that Barry doesn’t like or trust himself.

Cut 07 from Carmel Call:  More Random Practice  07-More Random Practice

Barry has the luxury of this particular interface with himself because he has begun the journey back to discovering who he really is; but he hasn’t completed it. There are plenty of people with less self-awareness who have no clue that they don’t like themselves or that there’s more to life than they can currently think or imagine. Barry has earned the perception of this particular discomfort; and with assistance, he will more further into it and discover himself as the author of it. He will learn how to bring attention to ever-deeper levels of himself: aligning more of himself behind how his life really is. He will clean out these predispositions, similar to how a dentist drills out decay in a tooth. If he continues this work, he will naturally wake-up a little more and a little more until he is able to freely attend to any and all aspects of himself.

If Barry wants to escape from this inherent smallness and discover the world at large, attention (awareness) will have to show up earlier in his process of living. First, he may have to discover that he has a predisposition that is guiding his every perception, thought, and moment. Just imagine! No matter what you have thought, experienced, or created…they are all influenced by parts of yourself that you really don’t know anything about and can’t perceive, let alone control.

With some attention, both you and Barry can wander the path back to earlier and earlier aspects of who you are and discover a purity, acuity, and presence that represents who you really are and isn’t throttled, choked and abandoned by who you pretend to be.

Cut 08 from Carmel Call:  Alice Searches  08-Alice Searches

The Trip Back

Barry will need to play with attention to explore these deeper parts of himself. Attention is our purely human gift. It is an ability to focus, it is awareness with a focus. Attention focused on attention generates awakeness. Awareness without attention is a broad interaction and ability to react or perceive that many species share. Attention on anything other than attention results in reactions which are  symptoms of sleepiness. When I first asked Barry about his relationship with his daughter, I posed the question using a huge, open frame. This forced him to either adopt the frame (providing an expansive search) or limit the frame (to defend himself, in advance. against the question, any answer he might find, and life in general).

Cut 9 from Carmel Call:  Moods  09-Moods

When interacting with Barry, it is my job to discover what kind of search he chooses to undertake. This is a simple process for me—composed primarily of kinesthetic responses to the spaces between Barry’s thoughts—but it wasn’t always simple. It took loads of unwinding and awakening and play with sensory acuity independent of judgment to witness what might appear to most people to be a small or even non-existent moment. I don’t necessarily expect you to believe I can do this or that it’s even possible. People who have worked with me for a while have seen this happen so many times they no longer doubt it. In fact, they’re in the process of learning how to glean so much from so little. I call this ability homeopathic perception.

Cut 10 from Carmel Call:  Practicing Relationship  10-Practicing Relationship

One aspect of exploring the spaces where Barry can go but doesn’t is the willingness to feel what Barry is feeling but doesn’t want to (and often doesn’t know that he is). There are many aspects of this light shining on obscurity. For now, it is sufficient for you to imagine there are all sorts of things going on with you that you are not yet able to focus your attention on. If you learn to focus your attention on these things, you would know yourself better and experience yourself as far more expansive, open, loving, and present. The trip back to who you are is the very trip that we have come to Earth to undertake.

Cut 11 from Carmel Call:  Harshness  11-Harshness

Once I discovered that Barry was limiting his search and how he was limiting it, I backed off a little. Rather than telling him not to limit his search or try to have him do something else, I directed his attention to a little game. This little game is to explore, in a non-challenging way, the connections between his words. This “Nonsense Game” led him into the spaces, into the searches between things. While coaching him, I offered him different ways of connecting things. All the while, I was not really making it obvious what it was I was going after. Being direct often gets in the way of the sense of play and wonderment we’re after here. There are many parts and aspects of ourselves that we need to sneak up on.

Cut 12 from Carmel Call:  The Blessed Shift  12-The Blessed Shift

However, I did explain some of what I was doing for the sake of a few people on the call who are advanced enough to catch on. While this process began with Barry, it applied equally to everyone else on the call and to all of us who have minds and defenses (which seems to be all of us). This is why I have others on the call play with the same exercise.

The nature of each person’s spaces is different. Each space is a different flavor and a varied mood. And each one undergoes a similar process to generate this mood. It involves engaging in a pre-attentive process of playing some ideal and unnoticed representation against a representation of how things are. This generates a predisposition (i.e., war) to defend who we really are from who we are pretending to be.

Discovering who we really are isn’t necessarily easy or hard; it is rigorous as it requires continued exploration with attention. Given our creation of artificial and pretend selves and our tendency to instantly believe our creations, we will likely perceive the journey back to be fairly difficult. The journey isn’t difficult, but our likely resistance to it—especially when it gets too real, too fast—makes the journey both epic and monumental. It is a very short journey and it often takes a long time. But the good news is you can enjoy it even when it is awful. Just remember that it’s a journey and that this is what you’re here to do.

Cut 13 from Carmel Call:  Patience  13-Patience

Because I’ve been working with Barry for a while (and because several others on the call have also been playing around my work for some time), we are able to enter into a deep, loving, open space. Once we get there, I test this space by asking Barry, once again, about his relationship with his daughter. This time, Barry is present to nearly infinite answers and uses the question not as a query about his daughter but as an opportunity to celebrate his own existence. The nature of his search is pure, endless, and profound. He has taken this journey in less than an hour’s time, and finds himself in awe of both himself and the world around him. Several other people on the call report the same sort of experience.

The conversion of a small restrictive search to an awe inspiring expansive exploration of “self” is part of the magic of this work. We go on so many searches each day—naming and trying to make sense of things, relating moments inside ourselves with movements outside—that dancing with our searches and our ability to attend to them yields, like a tiny rudder on a huge ship, the ability to navigate our lives with ease and pleasure through thick and thinking.

Cut 14 from Carmel Call:  Positive Predisposition  14-Positive Predisposition

A guy walks into a bar. The first words out his mouth are, “Should I kill everyone here or kill myself?”

Yikes! Your sentence starts with dying and one comma away comes the killing. Now that is a death sentence if I have ever read one. Is the “me” supposed to kill itself? That would be suicide. Or, is some other part of you supposed to kill the “me?” That would be homicide. Either way, it doesn’t sound like a bit-o-fun.

Oddly, I have to answer your question without giving you anything to hold on to. If I give you something to hold on to, you will strangle it. If I give you something that you believe, you will sacrifice—or kill—other things to make room for it. It’s far more likely you will kill than you will die. You murder the present and seek refuge in the past and future. You murder the flow and worship the blockage. You kill anything that moves and then kill anything that doesn’t. At the same time, you ask how to kill the “me” but you don’t want to be a murderer. Are you willing to become a murderer? Are you willing to kill the me even if it starts, or ends, a killing spree? You want to kill so you can be more alive. This is called human sacrifice, but the very process of it is far from humane. When irony gets tight enough, it begins to chafe and bind and we call that life. This is not living; it is chafing and binding.

There was once a nasty, old man who lived in our neighborhood. He even knew himself as “the nasty, old man.” Well…at least he knew himself.

It takes something (or the absence of something) to be an intentional killer. I doubt you have the stomach for it. It’s more likely you’ll remain an accidental killer. You will accidentally kill off all the parts of you that know better, all the parts that are awake, all the parts who don’t trust who you have identified with or voted for. Instead of seeking to kill the “me,” you might want to catch yourself already killing off all those other parts.

So, you who wish to be a killer, have you noticed? Have you noticed that none of our great spiritual teachers have had convincing successors? Have you noticed that organized religions are more organized than they are religious? Have you noticed that wanting something is a pretense? Have you noticed that having something is a void?

You, sweetly, ask, “how can I kill myself?” You want a “how-to” guide: a formula…a way to go about it. If there really was a formula that was effective, more people would be awake. Or people would be predictably awake. But they aren’t. I’m not sure how many thousands of people have practiced Transcendental Meditation (TM). My guess is a lot, for a long period of time. To me, TM amounts to having a mantra and repeating that mantra. In my experience, repeating a mantra (i.e., a meditative word or phase) just makes one dumb and numb. At this point in our endarkenment, we will settle for consistent results; if we can count on something to make us dumb and numb, at least we can count on something. I am not doubting the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was someone special, but having a gift and imparting that gift often prove to be rather different things.

Great Smokey Mountains National Park is something special: 800 square miles of pristine wilderness. The tributes we have built to this Park—Gatlinberg, Pigeon Forge, and Cherokee—are horrific. So it is that surrounding an awakening there tends to be fudge shops, bungee jumping, sanctuaries, practices, and/or mantras.

We create cause and effect pairings. Communion is to cannibalism as meditation is to ______________. Fill in the blank.

You’re looking for a formula for death, or at least the death of a certain part of yourself. If I give you a formula, you will follow it in a half-hearted way until you don’t. That is the way we do anything and everything. In sheep like fashion, you will attempt to follow whatever rules I put forth, or you won’t. Either way, a formula will fail. Once we find the formula, there simply isn’t a game anymore. When there is no longer a game, we lose interest and inspiration and attention soon leaves the building. While we are supposed to seek a formula, the formula isn’t the point, it is the object at the end. The seeking is the point. The seeking has us attempt (and in our perception we succeed) to leave where we are in hopes of arriving at some place that is more awake, more alert, more loving, more enlightened, and/or more of whatever we are after in the moment. In this very game of ten questions there is a seeking. It’s likely you are seeking being awake, and me seeking you.

You can convince yourself that you’re more likely to find your missing car keys by seeking them than if you don’t. This is something you’re likely to agree with. And yet, is it true? Like anything else, it is sometimes true and it is not true at other times. If you search your house for your car keys while they’re under the seat of your car, it simply doesn’t matter how long or how hard you seek for them; your efforts won’t yield car keys. The original act (sin) of limiting your search to the place where your keys aren’t, though perhaps accidental at first, is actually pivotal and becomes habitual.

You are searching for who you really are with a part of you (the “me” you mention in your question) that simply hasn’t got a clue. If you don’t know what a car is or what keys are, you could look for your car keys right where they are and still not find them. Not once, not ever. Your search is doomed. Waking up simply won’t submit to a search. It is something of a different kind and species than anything that will abide seeking. And yet, you find you can’t stop seeking. Nor should you, for the simple reason that you are seeking and even identify yourself as a seeker.

I have a piece of advice for you. If you are learning to juggle, don’t start by trying to juggle washing machines or automobiles. Put more simply, don’t attempt to learn juggling by starting with objects you can’t even lift. This makes juggling a far more difficult task. And yet, you’d rather not start where you are—you’d rather start a little closer to your destination. You want to start where you pretend to be. Let’s assume you see yourself as partially full of shit when, in actuality, you’re full of shit right up to the brim. This being the case, even if you bail out the shit you’re willing to admit to, you still have shit left over. Thus, you miss the destination, which is the present: no shit. Starting the search from a place where you’re not, you color the search erroneous right from the start. If this makes searching more fun, then lucky you. But you make your search serious. Often, you make it a life or death search while throwing yourself on the ground in protestation. “Woe is me,” you scream, or whine, or whimper.

Yes, parts of you need to die. More accurately, parts of you need to step back into the choir and stop trying to steal the show. Parts of you have become very spoiled and have consistently been rewarded for less-than-productive behaviors and agendas. These parts must voluntarily turn themselves over to the proper authorities: being. They get to admit they never really did have a clue in the first place and that they’ve been pretending all the while. These mischievous parts get to cop to pretending that they aren’t pretending and that these admissions are just another ruse (because ruses are the only toolzes they have).

If you play poker with people who simply can’t tell when you’re are bluffing (which is almost everyone you know), would you ever be honest? What in the world, or what in the internal world, would be your motivation for being honest? You have lied with your “me” part so many times that you have lost internal credibility. You have become so fictitious and so unbelievable that you have to search to find someone or some part of yourself that will believe you. You have Ponzi schemed yourself into a world where you can’t find anyone you would respect who believes a word you say or think. In a sense, that is a whole lot like death. The death of the “me” you pretend to be will be accompanied by the birth of parts of you that simply can’t not know better. These are parts of you that never have and never will buy the lies you live by.

Have you ever read Wind in the Willows? In this precious book, Toad—or Toady as his friends call him—falls in love with motorcars. Could be motorcycles, it would be the same thing. Something comes over Toad when he sees a motorcar. Toad can’t drive; he is the worst driver in the world. Toad just wants to drive. He steals cars, he gets in accidents, he makes messes that his friends try and bail him out of. Toad has found the love of his life and it simply isn’t the least bit good for him, at least in one sense. But it is also good for him in another sense. He has found his form of inebriation. He has found the only thing he always wants in life. Toad, of course, ends up in prison because he is simply incorrigible. He can’t stop and won’t stop.

You, Me, We are Toady.

Another book, Pinocchio, is one of the best selling books of all time. It is, in its long version, a book about a puppet trying to become a real boy. All he wants is to be a real boy, like Toady wants a motorcar. When Pinocchio lies and his nose grows longer. He misbehaves though he knows better. He wants to do “good” and he keeps doing “bad.” This is who we all are in a nutshell.

And the dying you speak of is falling in love with exactly that. It isn’t, as it might seem to be, getting rid of that part. It is falling in love with exactly how we are. It isn’t about changing a darned thing. It is falling in love with how it is. It is embracing the is-ness knowing full well that it is unlovable. It is loving ourselves without conditions—both the lovable and unlovable parts included. It is dying to the distinctions that separate us and waking to the lack of distinctions that join us together. At the same time voraciously making ever more cogent distinctions about everything and watching them die into judgments. It is about watching our best laid plans go amuck while both loving and hating the laying of the plans, the going, and the muck. It is the irony of planning a new way to live without plans. It is like practicing spontaneity. It is like wanting to meet John Travolta more than you want to meet those parts of yourself that don’t make your case. It is like building a suitcase that is too heavy to carry your stuff in. It is like denying yourself anything.

This dying is about the parts of us that depend on dichotomies and opposition and having them jump headlong into a world where these things don’t exist. It is about allowing the parts of ourselves that are beyond compare to come off their soap boxes and jump around in the mud.

This dying is about not editing (or predetermining) which parts of us meet what other parts of us It is about the entrance into a world where there are no diversions. But be careful. If it seems that, even for a moment, I am suggesting a formula then this is undermining and not contributing to your opening and awakening.

I will, at this point, ask some questions of myself. Have you, Jerry Stocking, made any progress?  Do you have any evidence at all that you have a bloody inkling of what in the world you are talking about? Or, what evidence do you have in the real world for what you are saying, Jerry? Or, why in the world should anyone listen to you? Or, what is this bullshit anyway? Seeing you have already told us that nobody knows and yet you go on writing?

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh, the final question is the (a) question.

I have been in the proximity of people waking up. While I don’t claim to be the cause of this, I do accept the responsibility of being a catalyst for it. When I am in their presence, the signs of waking up are obvious and undeniable. Moments after the waking up these same signs are totally negotiable and they disappear. If you miss them, you miss the waking up. While I am not specifically certain of what causes people to wake up, I continue to hone the specificity of the time and conditions in which they awaken. I continue to be in their presence as they awaken and go back to sleep. I also play consistently with the nuances of the awakened state. In other words, I am hot on the trail of “awakening to awakening.” And I don’t suspect, even for one tiny moment, that discovering this will make anything even the littlest bit better.

A wise man once said, “Anything you seek from waking up or from enlightenment you can get from growing up.”

Against all odds, I am growing up. I am blinking less, pretending less, deluding both more and less, and observing. Other than myself, the longest amount of time I have been in the presence of someone waking up is two years. The shortest is a matter of seconds. In most of my workshops there are varying degrees of waking up, from extreme to very subtle. I could tell you stories.

I will tell you a couple. Ray was in a workshop. Ray is into crop circles. Ray went to the bathroom at one point and he simply woke up. He came out of the bathroom and, “Yikes,” I said, “What is that, Ray?”

Sidebar: My work isn’t about producing these conditions of awakening. It is about augmenting awareness of the state when it is there. We have gone way beyond trying to produce conditions. If you produce them without getting to know yourself in the process, then awakening really is of no use at all. And I simply insist that awakening be of use. I am that kind of fella.

Ray spent the next hour or so in the spotlight as thirty people got doses of his being awake. He knew he was awake. Once I pointed it out, so did everyone else in the room. They knew it with very deep parts of themselves, parts of themselves that were in the presence of what they had been seeking for so long and parts of themselves that have never left that Ray place.

Ray was brilliant, Ray was funny, Ray was the sun, the moon, and the stars. Ray was the best parts of each of us with nothing left out. Ray had no interest in crop circles. Ray was pure and simply Ray…connected with everybody and everything. The arrival of Ray awake was instantaneous, and surprising. (How did he get there?) His return to the Ray of great limitation was gradual and graph-able. Ray never came back to do another workshop. Although while he was awake he indicated he certainly would. Ray is into crop circles.

I have discovered through decades of play that one of the fastest ways to chase people away is to give them what they are seeking. Not only do they go away, but sometimes they also go away mad. Though, as odd as their going away is, they almost, like a comet, return. When you give people what they’ve been wanting, they instantly (or a little more slowly) discover that it wasn’t really what they imagined It might be. People almost universally prefer their fairy tales and pacifiers to the real thing. They need a Coke—which poses as the real thing—and love stories of great awakenings, stories they can be told as they fall back asleep, to dream of their own awakening.

People don’t really want to wake up anymore than they want to die. People like the idea of waking up. They want to want to wake up. They are like Toad, in love with the idea of waking up. And, lest you missed it, I will repeat: people who have searched all their lives for awakening while following incredible paths of denial, pain, meditation, or prayer aren’t more likely to wake up than someone who hasn’t ever done a darned thing. Oh, does this piss the seekers off.

I have many other examples of waking up. Each was accompanied by specific and fairly universal qualities. Each was unique as well. Sometimes one person wakes up completely, like Ray, other times everyone in a workshop wakes up. Each time, we study the awakened state. Each time we try, to the best of my/our ability, to explore awake. So, in answer to an earlier question, I can’t call forth awake at will. But I do have many very specific ways of inviting it in and coaxing it to show itself. And it does so consistently. Give me someone and they will become more awake. Again, this is both an individual process and it has similarities between individuals.

The next obvious questions that might be worth asking at this moment are, “Jerry, are you awake?” and “Are you enlightened?”

My answer is simple. It is “yes” and “no” and “I don’t know.” Yes, obviously I am, because everyone is. No, because I can miss just about anything at any point in time and sleep soundly throughout my day. (The more you wake up the more you will discover that you are asleep; wishing to wake up without falling more asleep, while possible, isn’t likely. Ray did it for a bit, but then the light went back undercover, into the shadow of his personality.) I don’t know, because awake, as discussed in previous questions, can’t be known in any normal way. Only awake can know awake. If asleep knows awake, then it isn’t asleep anymore.

Light is simply light. Dark is the absence of light. We can’t drop the dark, we can only shine the light on it. We perceive, and experience, and sometimes know that light is one thing and dark is another. When, in fact, light is one thing and dark is the absence of that same thing. Dark isn’t something, it is the absence of something in particular.

The dying that you seek—and will do anything and everything to avoid—isn’t really a dying at all. It is a melting into living. What you currently call living is really death. We simply have it backwards. Should we be the least successful at finding anything we can reproduce in ourselves, we call it progress. TM makes people dull and numb, and we celebrate it. At least we were able to produce something. Then, all we need do is redefine dull and numb as peaceful and present and we have found the cure.

Victor Borge once said that his uncle found the cure there wasn’t even a disease for yet. Years later his wife caught the cure and died.

You get to die into a world that is just as it is. A world in which you aren’t numb, and you notice nearly everything but there is nothing “wrong.” Currently you are so busy rewarding what is “wrong” that it’s little wonder that “wrong” surrounds you. Wrong is the company you invited, and the company that came, and the company you keep. You think of your car a number of times per day, probably a similar number both yesterday and today. But if someone sneaks in to your garage and damages your car, you think of it much more often. You focus much more attention on it and thereby reward the damage. You look for what doesn’t work, you define yourself by attempting to fix what doesn’t work. You pour your energy into what doesn’t work. That is the essence of searching. It is seeking.

You die into the present. Anything you have built in the past or the future reveals itself to be unreal. The very process and filters you use to think, to sense, to know, and to experience begin to reveal themselves. My work, which does seem to work, is a continued focus on what is less tangible—and then converting it, with attention, to more tangible. Coaxing out the intangibles. Out into the light they come. And we discover, constantly, that something was going on before we noticed that something was going on. And appreciation for that pre-something as something generates a magical mood of reverence and acceptance bordering on presence. We are playing at the border. To get near the border you have to live more fully; to cross the border, you have to have enough to lose that you don’t want to lose it and you have to “knowingly” cross the border anyway. This is the dance. It is crossing and knowing that: you will lose what you most care about; what you cultivated will pass away; what you want the most will leave; and, what you don’t know is on the other side but bet on it completely. That is the dying. If you want to die, that simply precludes dying. If you seek to die you will likely become some degree of numb, because that is something we can produce.

There is a relationship between risk and aliveness; but as soon as I say that, the relationship undermines itself. What I mean by risk varies so quickly that it eludes us faster than we can chase it, even if we are really fast.

Examine what seems to wake us up: non-attachment, prayer, mindfulness, meditation, giving, receiving, laughing, watching Oprah, going to Sedona, worship, going to California, knowing yourself, focusing, The Secret, letting go, being in the present and so much more. Each one of these is perfect, and wonderful and at the moment of discovery is sufficient. But each one, in very short order—when it becomes THE answer, or the thing to do, or is ritualized, ruled,  defined, or repeated—becomes just another waste of time and energy.

Yes, you do need to die; but dying isn’t what you think it is. Dying by degrees isn’t the least bit fun, and once you start the process you quickly lose control of it and interest in it. You want to die when you want to die, and you want to go to dinner when you want to go to dinner, and you want to make love when you want to make love. You want to be in control of anything and everything. And you can’t ever be in control at all. Dying to the idea, the fantasy, or the “reality” of your being in control might be a really powerful first place to die. Not the death into passivity, but into an active attention on your lack of control. And yet, even prescribing this is giving you a nasty tasting medicine for a condition you don’t have. The cure without a disease.

Osho said, “The man isn’t feeling well. He goes to the doctor and the doctor gives him a prescription. After all the doctor needs people to doctor, he needs to help people and get paid for it so he can go on being a doctor. The man goes to the pharmacy and fills the prescription. After all, the pharmacist has kids he needs to support and it is important that he take care of himself and views that he is helping people. Then the man goes home and throws out the medicine. After all he has to take care of himself.”

So, I will not tell you what to do. Though it will sometimes seem that I do. I do not advocate a certain approach, though it will sometimes seem that I do. I do not think that I know better than you, though you will certainly both think that I think I know better than you and really think that I know better than you. I will use you. I will use you for my own exploration, for getting ever so much closer to what it is to be awake and how we awaken. You have just the qualities I seek. You are human and don’t know it. You seek to be awake. You are to some degree successful—successful enough that you can enter into the luxury of self-exploration.

What you may not notice is that you are already dying…melting into life. What is missing here, what comes pre-distracted, is your attention. Your attention is elsewhere while the process that needs to be going on in you already is going on in you. It is important that you, at least for a while, remain distracted. Because if you weren’t distracted, even for a moment, you might get in the way, you might discover that the Emperor has no clothes or you might pay attention to the man, or woman, behind the curtain.

3) If the me that thinks I am a me needs to die to wake up to the truth of who I am, how can I kill myself? By living.

Love, Me

Moe’s Question 2: If we are apparently already awake, but I don’t know or experience that, then how can it be said that I am already awake?

Dear Moe,

Your questions are so hook-laden there’s little wonder that you’re hooked.  The word “hooked” is a technical term that captures that moment in a fish’s life when—while minding its own business—it swims across a morsel of food and suddenly finds itself pulled inexorably out of its favorite medium (water) and into an imaginary world where it is either dinner, canned, or thrown back into the lake (minus any of the innocence it once had). If this sounds like a metaphor for our own self-pursuit, you are correct.

Within this seemingly simple question, you touch on three different levels while treating them as one. While this is a common occurrence, the act of missing or confusing levels never ends well. In fact, it is the root of all human suffering. Allow me to elaborate.

“Apparent” and “know” and “experience” are actually three very different human interfaces. However, you’re inadvertently treating them as though they are the same. This is roughly akin to utilizing three different strategies to improve your vision: putting on your eyeglasses; holding a book flat against your face; or closing your eyes entirely. Putting on your reading glasses may assist you in seeing better, whereas attempting to look through the book probably will not. Closing your eyes will certainly not assist you in improving your vision one whit, unless you’re easily distracted by external sensory noise and distraction. If this is the case, closing your eyes might be just the ticket to exactly where you want to go.

Sidebar:  A word about language, which you seem to suggest is a criterion for something. First off, ask any politician about language and he or she will say, “Anything can be said.” You can say you are awake, you can say you are asleep; you can say you are a woman, you can say you are a man. As Abraham Lincoln said, “You can call a dog’s tail a leg, but that doesn’t make it one.” And it certainly doesn’t mean that the dog has five legs.

Many years ago, I saw Art Linkletter at Mid-Vail in Colorado. Art is someone you may or may not have heard of, but that really doesn’t matter much; your having (or not having) heard of Mr. Linkletter really only has to do with you and in no way denies him existence or a good sandwich or anything. It doesn’t have you dispute his existence or doubt that there is, or was, such a person. I suspect you can imagine there are people in this world who apparently (your word) exist, but who you don’t know exist and you haven’t experienced as existing. Even so, you or someone else could still say they exist. Gandhi, Jesus, or John Travolta perhaps exist. There are different evidences for each, yet you wouldn’t deny any of them their existence. To deny their existence, you’d certainly be far enough outside of your own relevant business to be both wasting your time and energy as well as collecting problems you don’t need.

Let’s get back to Art—who certainly may exist, who I saw but didn’t meet, and who you may or may not know of. He once hosted a popular TV show: a kind of a candid camera for kids called, Kids Say the Darnedest Things. If you want something to be popular, make it about kids or dogs; if you want something to be notorious, make it about sex. Having led courses for thousands of people and been in the presence of any one of these walking, talking oddities we euphemistically call “human,” I must say that People Say the Darnedest Things. People will say practically anything. They will speak when they haven’t got a clue and pretend they have. They will speak when they jolly well ought to shut up. They will speak when it isn’t in their best interest. The gift of speech did not come the ability to relate to or embrace silence, and this really and truly is a human shame. The average man speaks about 2,000 words a day while the average woman utters about 7,000. I am not sure of the gay or lesbian count. How many of those words are “worth” saying and what does “worth saying” mean?  Was “worth saying” worth saying?  Did it make its own criteria, as in “you have to be this tall to ride this ride”?

In other words, you have to be a certain degree of awake to even notice that you are awake; and you must also have a certain level of self knowledge (perhaps the capability of shutting up?) to observe yourself at all. You can be a certain height, weight, and intelligence all without knowing that you are or have any of these. And what you say is really just your own personal contribution to global warming (i.e., hot air).

To boil it down, your question seems to suggest that if you don’t know of or experience something, what “good” is it? I suspect you don’t know the crystalline structure of water and yet still depend, to some degree, on ice. Actually, you depend on ice a lot, seeing that it is a primary constituent of maintaining the temperature of our planet. To do philosophy, make love, or be inclined to do anything at all, we need to have a certain ambient temperature. (Mercury is too hot for philosophy, while Venus is too cold.) While we need it hotter for making love than playing cards, we still depend on ice to keep things cool. So you might be better off knowing the crystalline structure of ice than at least half of the things that you actually do know.

(Footnote: Did you know water actually freezes in fourteen distinct crystalline structures?  What determines the specific structural formation is the ambient temperature and pressure. If there isn’t enough room for water to expand as it might like to in your freezer, it simply freezes in a subtly different form. The only reason I know this is that I have an endless curiosity and good friends. One day, I asked myself the question, “what happens to water if it is under such pressure that it can’t expand even though it is cold enough to freeze?” Fortunately, I was able to phone a friend—in this case my sister who is a hydro-geologist—and get the answer.)

Like water under pressure and in the presence of varying degrees of evidence, we form different crystalline structures, all roughly known to us as “knowing.” Examples of these structures are sensory data, logic, experience, faith, etc. Interestingly, we have even more than fourteen different evidentiary formats and each has its own inherent strengths and weaknesses. A lack of appreciation of these “levels of knowing” is a bit like painting Earth a single color.

Back to life as Art. Mr. Linkletter, doesn’t need you to exist or to have existed. This is lucky for Art. In the same way, “awake” can reside comfortably in you without your knowledge, attention, or experience of ever running across its path.

In other words, awakeness doesn’t need you to know or experience it for it to exist. Awake is a special quality; it is a world aware of itself. It happened on Earth in human beings. The moment one person awakened, Earth was a planet aware of itself.  Thank goodness neither one of us had to be the first person to wake up. How lonely must that have been to be the only one: how sick.

Since that first awakening, other people have also woken up. More accurately, everyone has awakened; but they’ve done so by degrees. It may be that everyone has the possibility of waking up completely; but certainly everyone is awake to a certain yet varying degree. The question isn’t really whether you are awake or not; the question is, “how awake are you?” The good news is you can regard the “how” of this question in its quantitative sense (i.e., meaning to what degree am I awake?) or you can see it in its more beneficial light as “how do I awaken?” And this opens a very practical doorway leading to practices for awakening.

There are degrees of awake. And awake itself is a slippery concept. Awake is the observation of a process that most of us perceive as a thing. Things have certain qualities including structure. Awake may also have structure (I don’t want to deny it that) but we certainly don’t know what that structure is. It’s easy to say you are awake or that you aren’t awake; but if questioned, you really must admit you haven’t a clue what awake really is, what makes it come and go, or even if it does come and go. Awake is best approached with openness. Yet any attempt to know or experience being awake is to approach it with closedness and with specific criteria.

I am told that there are people who can pick a place in the woods and sit so still that a deer will not only approach, but won’t even notice their presence. This stillness even allows them to gently touch the deer. This is a far more advanced practice than shooting a deer with a high-powered rifle from a quarter mile away, but it doesn’t lead to venison for dinner. I am suggesting that you are hunting the state of being awake. Actually, you’re really hunting the knowing or the experiencing that you are awake.  I want you to stop that, simply because it’s a waste of time and energy.

Please allow me to explain: to submit something to knowing and experiencing (e.g., awake) is to require it to put on a specific show for you. This is not unlike requiring a deer (dear) to dance for you before you will call it a deer (dear). “Awake” is, as far as I can tell, formless. Requiring it to have form (in the same way everything else you experience or know has form) simply precludes you from observing it or observing through it. Worse yet: awake is actually a certain kind of “knowing” so it joins knowing and experience as interactive filters. In other words, knowing reveals itself to be a process not an object. Your question suggests you are in search of an object instead of searching with a specific filter called “awake.”

When looking for a noun, a verb is simply too fleeting to notice or register in your search.  In fact, when searching for a noun, you are already under the spell of the verb called “searching.” Searching is a jealous verb that seeks to keep you from all other verbs. Whether you know it or not, you’re wanting “awake” to stop, disrobe, dance, and offer itself up to you. It might do that if it could; but given how unaware and unawake most people are, there just isn’t sufficient interface with the land of awake to put it to the very tests you’re wanting to subject it to. At this point (in time and level) we will have close calls with awake, and we need to be thankful for those.  If you were to become truly awake, you simply couldn’t relate to the rest of us; we would be too slow, too stupid, and way too transparent. We would become rednecks at your symphony. Careful, please dear, what you ask for.  Awake is a game in process. It is a partial offering. Not because awake itself is partial, but because our bandwidth isn’t currently sufficient to withstand very much of it. Awake is only a game so long as you don’t have all of it. And we do love a game.

I will now stretch way beyond your question and hint at how we might relate to “awake” more effectively. From what I can tell, like everyone else you possess certain abilities and not others. You might want to cultivate a witness. A witness is a pre- or post-reactive persona with little or no vested interest in a given outcome—and thus is open to whatever happens along. I can tell from your willingness to play this game that you’ve already worked and played a great deal—opening yourself to the magical “yes” word. And to this I say, “well done!”

Yet there remain imbalances you continue to pay tithe to. There are responses you must make, words you must speak, and preferences you feed at least daily. In other words, your witness often goes hungry in the face of preconceived outcomes. As your witness develops you will learn about the land of awake.  You will discover awake is chasing her own tail (tale). You will discover what you’ve been after all along is awakening to awake—which is simply running before you can walk or even crawl.

There are so many simple ways to approach awake and cultivating awareness can further most of them. As you do so, awareness will reveal itself not only as “no object” but as your interface with objects. It will work its way back to that which you really are—the beautiful blooming into discovering oneself as a human being. As you begin playing with awareness, you will also discover its persistent twin: attention. Attention is simply awareness with focus or direction.

Cultivation of awareness and attention is what my work is about. Without cultivating this pair of twins, there just isn’t the possibility of the discovery of awake.

All that said, you just might want to know what awake is. This way you’ll have an idea of what you’re going after. Awake is a wake left by existence as it zooms on its way. It is an after-effect, like the wake behind the boat of existence.  As such, it isn’t really awake you are after (except as an interim project); it is existence you are after, and we certainly would have to be deeply head bound to argue that you don’t have that.

“If we are apparently already awake, but I don’t know or experience that, then how can it be said that I am already awake?”

“How.” you ask? Easily.

Love, Jerry

]]> http://www.awakeningweb.com/awakening/more-moe-dialogue-2/feed 1 http://www.awakeningweb.com/awakening/embracing-being-nyc-march-2009 http://www.awakeningweb.com/awakening/embracing-being-nyc-march-2009#comments Thu, 09 Apr 2009 09:39:11 +0000 judson9 http://www.awakeningweb.com/?p=412 Dear Mom,

I just arrived home from the Embracing Being Course in New York City.  We held the workshop in a beautiful venue on the sixteenth floor in downtown Manhattan.  The room was huge with a smooth darkwood floor and windows all around with picturesque views of the city.  They called the meeting room a sacred space, which in this case meant we had to remove our shoes and weren’t allowed to eat in the room.  Sacred?

The first evening of the course was for both course participants and guests.  We had nearly fifty people that evening including old hands, people who have done courses with me for years, young hands, people who have done a course or two or who have been on cluster calls but not yet done a course, and new folks.  The mix of all three groups makes for a fast and very pleasurable evening.  I had to keep the attention of each group by delivering the course on several different levels at the same time.  Two of the evening’s guests were women who I had met on match.com but not in person.  I suspected that this would make me nervous, instead it inspired me.

I never really know how a course will go.  I begin the course by clearing out everything I know, so the evening is “new” to me.  Much of what happens in the course is dependent on the participants and in this course it was participant driven.  People started out with questions right away:  my favorite.  A theme that began to emerge as several people asked questions is that the people wanted grounding.  They wanted to know how to be more present and to quiet the crazy conversations or wild pictures in their heads.  Though they didn’t say it, it seemed that they wanted to settle down into a gentle peace that would let them relax and yet still get a lot done.

As you know I am endlessly fascinated by people.  Something you taught me well.  If you don’t mind I will tell you about several of the people who stand out from the first evening.  Anne deserves first billing.  She is blond, blue eyed and beautiful, but what is even more interesting about her is that she is an enneagram 7.  She has loads of energy and her focus of attention is all over the place.  Not in a bad way, actually in a very powerful way.  She is effervescent almost to the point of spontaneous combustion.  Not surprisingly she teaches hundreds of elementary school kids.  I played with her a good deal that first evening.  Anne wasn’t registered in the weekend.  But she came back the next day and signed up.  It was great to have her as she is endlessly curious and always has something to say.

Jeff, another person I haven’t met before came Friday night, has been listening to my work for three or four years.  He has been listening to many recordings of my courses more than fifty times.  He was far more present than most of the people in the group and attributes that presence to all the listening he has done.  I was amazed the first time Jeff spoke.  He was already peaceful, already at ease and offering deep gentle parts of himself for all of us to enjoy.  I was reminded that if people just listen, even to the same course over and over, they will get huge benefits in their lives.  Jeff continued to be a treat all weekend long.

Several other people stand out from Friday evening.  A man named Jan who is smart but suffers almost constantly was there.  I am so sorry he didn’t do the weekend as I would have enjoyed watching him begin to enjoy himself and take himself much less seriously.  There was a woman who is a life coach, who, though stuck in new age hyper-masculine hype, was fun to play with.  A young Russian woman, a photographer, interacted with the group.  Oddly, she was wildly visual and ungrounded, but the moment I had her speak in Russian she was grounded again.  Amazing to watch her shift depending on which language she was speaking.  One of the women from match.com was gentle.  She has been meditating for nearly twenty years and it shows, in both positive and negative ways.  She is very peaceful but at the same time so deep inside that she is difficult to reach.  The other match.com person was distant the whole evening.  One of the basic things about leading a course like this is to allow people to be just where they are, that way they get moving pretty quickly.

Friday night ended with Anne, the wild and wooly school teacher, in tears and with lots of laughs and learning’s for all of us.  It was both an auspicious and a really enjoyable evening.  I am amazed at the way courses take their own shape, just the shape they need to be for the people involved.

Saturday morning the course continued with people who would be there for the whole weekend.  Three people who had been guests Friday night registered and joined us for the whole weekend.  Saturday and Sunday we played, and played and played some more.  As usual I created new models and used those models to both get to know the people more fully and encourage them to get to know themselves.  Probably the most telling part of the weekend is that nearly twenty of the twenty seven participants were registered in the next New York Course by Sunday evening.

It is difficult to explain what we do in these courses, which often makes it tough to register people.  It isn’t possible to tell them exactly what they are in for or precisely what they will receive from a course.  Typically by Sunday morning course attendees are peaceful, playful and far more present than they began.  After the course people report that every aspect of their lives is far more livable and entertaining.  Not only do they have fun at the course but they continue to reap benefits in every aspect of their lives.  The results that people discover in their lives from coming to the course are so wide spread and diverse that they really need to experience them.

When I think back to the weekend, thinking of each person there, I realize that not only am I doing exactly what I should be doing and what I am really good at, but I have an ever growing population of interesting, competent, friends to play with in the process.

As you know I could go on and on, describing more course participants and discoveries from the weekend.   Instead I will give you a few glimpses of your son working (see video below) and begin getting ready for the next course which I lead in Portland, OR next week.  I go early to Portland to enjoy the flowers.  This time of year everything is blooming; the people will be blooming as well.

The unorthodox nature of my occupation and my life’s purpose comes back to you.  Your interest and endless curiosity about people inspired my interest in the depths and wonderment of my fellow human beings.  I made being compassionate of people into a career that makes my life worth living and surrounds me with people who are growing and exceeding their wildest dreams.

Thank you.    Love, Jerry

PS  Here is what another participant at the course wrote about the New York Course!  Click!!

PPS  And here are some short movies of me playing in the Course:

There are many presuppositions in what you have written.  To deal with them all would take a lot of writing.   I will start down that road just to show you what it is like: I have agreed to answer ten questions you pose to me, but already, in your first question, you have snuck in two questions.  So, Moe, we know you are sneaky, and I suspect, from the little I “know” of you so far, that it was not your intention to be sneaky; it was not something you wanted or chose.  It was just something you did, probably without even noticing.

If I am correct and you didn’t notice yourself asking two questions, but did it anyway, can we assume that you do things without noticing?  That would seem to be a fair assumption:  Are you with me?  If that is the case a simple question arises.  That question is:  How much of what is going on with you are you aware of? Are you aware of your heart beating?  Not can you be, but were you.  Are you aware of your left big toe?  Your motorcycle?  Your current connection with Tracey?  Your sexual preference?  Your current degree of hunger?

I suspect and am, in fact, quite sure that you were not aware of any of those things until you read them and then became aware of them.  You were forced to be aware of each in a stimulus (my written words)–response (your thinking of the words) fashion.  I suspect, and can easily prove that you are not very aware of what is going on with you–ever.  You miss almost everything almost all the time.  As do I.  Since you miss almost everything all the time let’s start our exploration from something way closer to the truth than where we usually start.  Let’s start with the assumption that you miss almost everything almost all the time.

Starting from there the first thing that might make sense is to take anything you think with a grain of salt.  And, take anything you become aware of, notice, with a mountain of gratitude.  Continually bask in the reverence of all you are missing, without having to be specific about what you are aware of, because specificity is a particular kind of preferential mix of attention and control.  Bask in “not knowing”, in not being aware of nearly everything.  Let “not knowing” fill you up, pick you up, brush you off, and send you on your way to your next knowing.

The first of your two questions reveals that you think you can, by what you want, determine what happens with you.  In other words, wanting is somehow in charge of something.  You confirm this philosophy by using the word choosing in the second question.  Choosing reinforces your presupposition of volition which I suggest is anthropomorphic.  It is attributing human characteristics to a sufficiently limited aspect of you, so limited that it doesn’t capture enough humanity to be called human.  People continually think they are in control of their lives, or in control of something, that they can wake up when they wish, or eat when they want to, or get angry by their own volition or choice.  I find little, in fact no, evidence for this rampant supposition.  If, rather than starting from a rather horribly flawed model of “free choice” in which you sign up for control only to be hit, really hard, by the train of consequences that always smashes us after an erroneous beginning, you assume that you have no choice at all and that you are completely automated, then, and likely only then, will you be much closer to what is the case.  Beginning from this opposite premise you threaten who you have pretended to be; which is a kind of time release suffering.

If you get caught in the loop of thinking you want to wake up, but you can’t wake up, but you want to wake up, but you don’t know how to wake up, then you are in fact beating yourself.  You are abusing yourself by opening the door to the idea that things are other than they “should” be, or other than you “want” them to be, or other than you “chose” them to be.  And you embed the idea that you actually have any clue about how things are, which we have hopefully proven that you do not.  With that door open it is simply you against how things are.  That is a war you can fight forever but can’t ever win.  You don’t know how things are, you will never know how things are, so the whole goofy dance of having them try and be a specific way when you don’t even know how they are or will be dips you into absurdity.  Absurdity is being in the presence of nothing while imagining you are in the presence of something.

You wanting (waking) is no more connected to your experience (of waking) than it is to anything else.  You would like there to be a causal or at least personally intimate connection between the two. In other words, you wish to define yourself as a worthwhile human being because you can experience waking up when you want to.  If you, even for a few days, were in charge of what you experience (which is a conspiracy, at least currently, between attention and what you call truth) you would drive yourself absolutely wiggy.  We have been put on automatic pilot purely on purpose.  You wouldn’t put a three year old in charge of our nation.  You wouldn’t let a three year old drive you down the highway on your motorcycle, with you on the back, arms around the three year olds waist with complete trust.

We simply think that we are mature and able.  We perceive that we are old enough to play with matches, or knives, or bombs, or relationships, when we aren’t actually even mature, able or grown enough to be in charge of our own experience, senses, thoughts, attention, or will.  We, thankfully, aren’t in charge of any of those things.  When we are sufficiently responsible, and hopefully not a moment before, we will be in charge.

You came here to Earth to play.  Some people play by trying to make enough money to buy a house or a car.  Some come here to have a child, some to do a job, some to save the world, some to wake up.  There was probably a time, at the beginning of a game, when you said you wanted a child; whether you heard yourself say this or not is really only relevant to you.  You said you wanted a child.  And then, sometime later or earlier you had one.  It would be really cool if you said you wanted a child somewhat before you had one, then had one, and then wanted one even more.  And still want one, since you have one.  For many people they don’t have a clue that they want a child before they have one, while they are having one, or ever.  Having a child is a game.  It is a game when you don’t have one to want something you don’t yet have.  It is a game after you have one to want something you do have.

At this moment, and probably for a while, you have a game called “waking up.”  You are at some stage in that game, and the stage you are in is before waking up while wanting waking up.  It, like everything else, is just a stage. In this stage you have to think that waking up is the prize and that when you wake up life will be better.  The parts of yourself that know better keep quiet as you throw your weight behind this game.  At some point it is likely that you will wake up (the causes and conditions of this we will get to with later questions).  At that point you will be very happy and thankful for about 18 seconds. Those 18 seconds will be followed by the discovery that what you were after (waking up), isn’t the least bit like what you thought it would be.  In fact, that waking up is substantially worse than not waking up.  That waking up imposes a new kind of responsibility and results in ever greater segregation from others.  The responsibility I speak of here is the ability to respond, not the burden most people perceive responsibility to be.  The segregation I speak of is paired with integration.  But when attention goes just to the segregation, you experience a loneliness few people actually want.  And when you focus just on the twin, integration, it is the melting of oneself into others so fully that you lose any possibility of personal.

So, rather than going on, and on, and on, which I suspect you know by now I could, let’s just make the answers to your questions simple:

If I really wanted to experience being awake could I? Nope…in other words am I choosing at some level to keep sleep walking? Yes

Love, Jerry

I remember being an assistant for The Six Day course when a blind participant was enrolled.  One of the days of the course was particularly memorable for me; the day all course participants, and assistants, wore bathing suits.  Ten participants at a time would stand on a small riser in front of the room with the rest of the group looking at them.  Standing in a bathing suit in front of a group of people without talking takes the fear of public speaking to the next level.  This was the fear of public silence.  The people in front of the room would cry, shake, and wail as they confronted their own personal fears, inhibitions, self image, and feelings of self worth.  Everything they did impacted their experience.  Clocks, watches, and timepieces were not allowed in the course room, but it was obvious people would stand until they had nothing left.  Some people would fall down, not from fatigue but from the weight of the experience.

My job, as the chosen assistant, was to be the blind man’s eyes for the full fourteen hours or so of the experience.  I was to keep an ongoing descriptive monologue into the blind man’s ear.  My observations, not judgments, were translated into his experience, every second of every minute of every hour of fourteen hours of self realization for 100 participants.  Imagine.  When he went to the front of the room I went with him so he could visualize the experience of the group seeing him.  He “saw” everything there was to see that day through my reports.

I gave birth to his visual experience; healing the blind, allowing him to see.  It took me days to recover from that experience.  If I did.

You can have your own version of this experience with a friend.  Try being blind, have your friend lead you around.  Then step up the game by having your friend be blind and you speak to them continually describing so they can “see”.

Many years later, with the birth of a witness within me, I have had similar experiences.  It seems that a particularly scary and universal aspect of waking up is having attention without an object to put it on.  In most people’s unawakened lives they are surrounded by objects that consume their attention the way Tums consumes 27 times its weight in excess stomach acid.  As long as we don’t have excess attention, life is OK.  We can get behind, lose ourselves, and fall into a kind of waking sleep.  But when you exit the world of crazy busyness with extra attention you begin to wake up.  As you wake up you simply have way too much attention.  This attention produces a kind of insanity, being ahead of experience rather than behind it.  It has you discover that you are creating everything rather than continually reacting to a sequence of stimuli.

While this attention without object may sound like fun the experience of it is terrifying.  It is anxiety squared.  Waking up, which is what happens as attention without objects persists, brings you to the present.  In the present there is really nothing to do, nowhere to go, you sit with the sensations of existing.  In this pregnant state, giving birth to yourself, each moment is over the top.  Among other things you discover that life before this experience was a bit like being a Hermit Crab.  You find a shell to live in, and you try not to outgrow that shell.  Even after you outgrow it you still hang out in it for as long as you can, but when you really don’t fit anymore you leave your shell and find another.  As you look for another shell you are vulnerable and in great danger.  When you find a new shell you, again, try not to outgrow it.  This shell game is what life without waking up amounts to.

Waking up isn’t easy, but it is worth it.  Attention without object is actually something we practice in my workshops.  The simple exercises provide you with the tools you will need when your time to awaken arrives.