New Experiment: Losing Yourself

I’ve been writing about my recent experiment on losing myself in time/space in the TTB forum and thought I should share it here too. Here it is:

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So… I sometimes use a metaphor to understand conscious awareness as opposed to unconcious awareness. I think of the unconcious as an immense dark sea and conciousness as a torch/flash light that illuminates bits of the sea. Most people’s beams are directed automatically in only certain limited places… that’s not important in this case – what is important in this case is the actual light beam – how much light/attention do you have? and how much of it is taken up by automatic tasks?

One of the things we tend to do is constantly scan the environment so that we know ‘where we are’ – “I’m at home, I’m in bed, I’m at work, I’m in London, I’m in a new location, I’m on the pavement”. This is completely automatic – you dont think about it and you dont notice yourself doing it – it’s there to make us feel safe – because ‘where we are’ often equates to how safe we are. But the thing is this constant scanning is using up a huge proportion of our light beam – even if we dont need to know where we are… it also uses up our energy, our attention and gives our ego the chance to start trying to control ‘where you are’. Constantly working out what’s safe, what’s compelling, where to go etc. If you dont know where you are – and have no concern in knowing this, you cannot feel unsafe, you cannot grasp and attempt to control things beyond your control, you cannot worry or plan etc. basically you can become still and present in the now – if only you lose yourself… in other words lose your concern over where you are.

So try this out if this sounds like it could be usefull – I first tried it lying in bed – because I remember doing something similar as a child for entertainment. Feel yourself in bed in whatever room you are in – then feel yourself in bed in another room, then another, then another – keep going, each time really feel the place and then move to another place – keep going and keep getting faster and faster at some point it becomes a blur – keep the blur spinning and suddenly you’ll pop out of it into emptiness – you are nowhere/everywhere… usually (unless you’ve done a lot of meditation) this is frightning – and you’ll immediately re-locate yourself in your room. But getting comfortable in losing yourself gives you a much bigger light beam of awareness to play with – whether in your practices or in interacting or just when you’re relaxing.

dont do this while crossing the road or driving! 😛

As a child I’d do something similar – I’d imagine my bed positioned in different parts of the room, untill I was confused as to where in the room I really was… but I still knew I was in my room…

P.S
I know most of you won’t try it – but for the adventurous ones that do, please let me know how it worked out! 🙂

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I’ve noticed something else – I got a friend to try it out – and initially he couldn’t do it. So I got him to start much slower… feel and sense where he was, then think of somewhere else and slowly build up the sensory detail of being there (it turned out that remembering the smell quickly got my friend feeling that he was fully in that location)… then we do it again – another location which we would slowly sense with all our senses (what we saw, heard, felt (texture, temperature etc. but also emotion) smell, even taste) it seems some people have one of the senses as the ‘boss’ – because that sense immediately makes an imagined environment feel real.

So yeah – at first it took a couple of minutes for each location, but it got faster and faster (especially after learning what (sense) it is that makes it seem ‘real’) and then you just have to trust yourself and change locations in milliseconds then almost nanoseconds (that’s where it becomes a blur) and then you speed it up to infinity and suddenly pop out into ‘living stillness’.

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Please share your experiences if any of you try it out – there are other powerfull applications of the same technique which I’ll reveal after a few of you have success with this one.