Just One Look Forum Archives

Hi, everybody.

I've been missing from the forums for some time but now I'd like to make a certain conclusion to my practice of the looking. I've been "practising" for about 3 years now.

Most of that time I've been trying to accomplish this act and as I said many times before I've had my share of completely illusory ups and downs. I wanted happiness and satistfaction badly.

Well, I tried many-many times to look at myself. But happiness on a permanent basis did not come. So I decided to leave this practice completely and I now see that it was a right decision.

You see, it seems to me that I'm sick in a way. I have a very hyperactive mind. Most of the time it is almost impossible for me to turn my attention away from thoughts and just do something without trying to understand it, control it or whatever. For years I've been only thinking about this act more or less subtly. There was no conscious recognition of myself. It is plain to me now but it was not so before. The hyperactive human mind is fond of playing with itself and ultimately deceiving itself.

Well, I finally managed to get a taste of "me". I consider it a kind of good luck actually. I can't even do it again but it seems unnecessary. I won't burden you with the details here but I'd like to tell what this "seeing" did to me because it is really surprising.

It is really hard to explain what happens and I now understand why John struggled for 13 years to do it. It's really tempting to talk about psychology and metaphysics here but...

It did not make me happy and content. I think it gave me freedom of choice in my life.

Before the "seeing" I felt like I was absent from my life. I was a passive, miserable, almost non-existent element in the whole thing. I felt like I was a passenger on an unstoppable train going straight into Hell. Whatever I tried to help myself only made the ride worse.

Now I feel like I can leave this train. I feel that I can actually do things and make a change in my own life. I now see that it is futile to wait for happiness. It will never come by itself.

That's my outlook on life now and I am grateful to John and Carla for that.

To sum this all up, my keywords for the result of this work are freedom of choice and responsibility.

thank you for posting this. it is helpful. what i'm hearing talk about is subtle, so it helps to hear it expressed. it is like the blind men and the elephant: the more check-ins there are where we hear how it is for someone else, the more we can place our own hints and transitions into the schema. i appreciate that. there is also a sense of maturity from the last two postings. this is exciting. blessings, marlowe

Dirty jokes aside, I too came to the conclusion that the human mind, when left to its own accord, has an immense talent for self-deception. For quite some time now the idea that the only thing that happens once you consciously look at yourself is that your break the bond between consciousness/attention and the activity of the mind. Up until that point, attention is permanently stuck on the great show that is mental activity, like a baby glued to a tv screen, eyes hopping from one interesting, moving, colorful object to the next. Once that tie is broken, and it really only takes one look as far as I know, the show just goes on in its own space, but with the option of not having to look at it. As far as freedom of choice goes, that to me seems to be the only choice we have : not going there. I can get engrossed in the mental products, but it's more an old habit than an actual response to life, and I can snap out of it with more and more ease as time goes by and the hyperactivity loses momentum.

I already mentioned this in another post, but for me, responsibility is now a given instead of a choice. Running away from life and not taking responsibility is the old and ancient way of the mind to deal with life by not dealing with it, self-deception at its finest, the great art of denial. But it's just what we're taught as children of children, and it's this ancient art that is now slowly destroying the world. But for me, apart from having the choice not to go there, what now rules my life is rather a freedom FROM choice. I'm being more metaphysical than I'd like to be right now, but more and more it seems to me that the word choice has no meaning, life doesn't present choices, mind does, and when you live with attention freed from the ties with mind activity, there is seldom more than one "choice" to choose from. At least that is my present experience, whenever I have to choose between options it occurs to me time after time that it's the mind who's weighing pros and cons, and going into scheming mode to fool life into doing what "I" like. When I don't indulge in these trains of thought, life goes on through me, and in retrospect I can say : there was a problem, I solved it by choosing to do such and such - but always in retrospect. But enough with the meta.

Thank you for posting this, it helped me to form the words and ideas for what I just wrote. I hope this is of any help to someone.

Wouter

The looking gives you what? The looking gives you. No different than before looking just once more. The looking gives you. You are you. Live. Thank you, John, for your suggestion.