Try to remember the most incredible pain you ever had…can you do it?
Or the most wonderful flavour, orgasm or sunset. Or your oldest memory. We can remember snapshots, like old photos of the past, but pretty soon we are remembering the snapshot rather than the original moment.
Thats how precious this moment is, you never get it back and you can never replicate sensation with memory.
Imagination is fun, a very useful tool. Any tool that runs out of control though, is unlikely to produce anything of beauty.
Those richest moments of our lives are made so by the depth of our aliveness, by how alive we “felt”.
I dont ever recall having a magic thought, though I have shared many great days, mostly outside, always in connection with people or nature.
The richest memories are made by including lots of sensory data - smell, touch, taste, sound as well as beauty. That is perhaps why we like to eat, play or enjoy music at social events - to add rich sensory contrast to the moment.
This is very different from thinking - thinking is very cool, dont get me wrong. Many times though, we are thinking when we could be doing a lot more feeling.
When we think, we do so in the language of labels and short cuts - short cuts are opinions, these are things we have adopted as assumptions so that we know how to act, what to choose, to get what we want.
We call upon memorised knowledge to make decisions and we try to follow powerful habits that will improve our lives. We try to become reliable, dependable, valuable, desirable, entertaining and clever. All of this “trying” can keep us in our heads, constantly trying to figure out what to do.
Our methods of attaining what we want or avoiding what we do not, keep us in endless strategy. Everything we see and hear, triggers our opinions and the inner dialogue becomes the loudest signal in our lives.
We even use methods to try to stop using methods. Like doing Yoga or mediation a certain way to gain freedom from emotional conditioning - yet the more strongly we are attached to our method, the more that method itself becomes an emotional conditioning.
I find myself resisting all man made structures, reasoning that nature is all the system we need, that interrupting nature just creates problems for others. However my resistance to other peoples creations and methods is also a kind of conditioning.
Anytime I am upset, it is because I am comparing this moment to a concept I have about how “it ought or ought not to be”. Anytime I choose a concept over the actual sensation of this moment, I am at war with what is. Nothing will send me deeper into mind than thinking I have to fight when I do not.
Grace is a state of acceptance, because acceptance is the doorway to our senses. Reality is only available through our senses.
No - leads back to strategy and control and the loss of relationships that can only exist here and now.
Yes - leads back to sensation - awareness - presence, with all the rich experience of the world and each other that we call JOY.
Without strategy, without attachment to “a” method, great skill is possible, perfect movement is possible. When it does not matter what happens next, we are happy to be surprised, we are ready.
Delighted even.
Psychobiology - has no method, beyond……..yes it is
=8-P