Warrior's Log - Four

“There is nothing wrong with being afraid. When you fear, you see things in a different way.”

"He added that nothing in this world was a gift, that whatever there was to learn had to be learned the hard way."

"One can feel with the eyes, when the eyes are not looking right into things."

"Fear is the first natural enemy a man must overcome on his path to knowledge. Besides, you are curious. That evens up the score. And you will learn in spite of yourself; that’s the rule."

"Whenever you look at things you don't see them. You just look at them, I suppose, to make sure that something is there. Since you're not concerned with seeing, things look very much the same every time you look at them. When you learn to see, on the other hand, a thing is never the same every time you see it, and yet it is the same. I told you, for instance, that a man is like an egg. Every time I see the same man I see an egg, yet it is not the same egg."

Warrior of Lite

Looking vs. Seeing

 There is a difference between the freedom of a still mind and the freedom of no mind.

The freedom of a still mind is like kayaking in still water. It is peaceful. You can direct attention wherever you choose, and it rests there because you are so still. And it is almost useless in regular life.

The freedom of no mind is like kayaking with no fixed point inside you. You are not separate from what you experience. You are not watching it.

How do you lose your mind? You look again and again at what cannot be seen, your own mind. Stillness helps with that looking. It helps a lot. Yet stillness by itself, even the extraordinary stillness of infinite space, infinite consciousness and so on, is not enough.

You have to see. And to see, you have to look.

Look again and again at what cannot be seen. At some point you see nothing - you really see nothing. You know, through your own experience, that there is no you in you, no fixed point - nothing. That experience makes all the difference. As thoughts, feelings and sensations arise in your life, you experience them without any fixed reference point. They are not "other."

You move with them and through them, just like you move with and through the waves in a kayak in the ocean.

What do you do about thoughts, feelings and sensations? Nothing. They are free, free, to come and go on their own, just like the waves in the ocean.

…and so are you, because you have lost your mind.

TMMK