Just One Look Forum Archives

Hello John.

This is my third week with the looking and within long time of self-inquiry. When I put my attention on what it feels like to be me I feel it mostly centered around my heart center. The feeling of myself is changing although it always feel it is me. The feelings "I am angry" is different from the feeling "I am blissful", and both are felt in the body associated with the sense that those feelings are happening to me. When I am in a new place or meeting a stranger on the road I have a different feeling of myself. You can see that my sense of me is associated with the body. The only thing that does not seem to change is the awareness. I always exist as awareness, but the feel of myself is arising and passing away. I can put my attention on my felt self but I must be the formless watching behind the attention. The feeling of myself associated with the body and the vasanas is arising by itself. I can not experiance myself as that which knows because it is not an experience and I am it. And I am also the changing person connected to the body. So as you see my understanding is a little different. Maybe I miss something maybe not. My feeling is that this is what Ramana wanted me to do. It is already taking my life to better way of being in the world.

Shony

Dear Shony,

I am (obviously) not John, so I cannot answer in his name, only in mine. I was a long time seeker in many spiritual traditions, including the more traditional (there is no self, no me, no ego, I am pure awareness etc.) variations. I haven't, however, found deep, lasting, satisfaction in neither one. I stumbled upon John's message at some point and, frankly, I ignored it for a couple of years. Fortunately, I tried his suggestion before deciding it wasn't worth following it. And so, the looking at myself followed me silently for a couple of years, showing up at times, when some technique or teaching couldn't work anymore. Looking at myself seemed to pop up at the weirdest times. I guess that caught my attention and I decided to give it a committed go. And so I did. This is, in brief, my own experience. I hope it serves you in some way. Even if it doesn't, keep up the looking, you won't be sorry.

My own experience was this, in brief: the most noticeable thing was that the feeling of beeing "at stake" that John talks about has evaporated. There is still hardship and there are still problems, some of which cannot be overcome, but when that happens, there is no resistence to it. No resistence to being happy, no resistence to being sad, no resistence to good things, no resistence to bad things. And if there is resistence, there is no resistence to it. I know, it sounds funny. It actually is.

I am becoming more and more transparent to others. There is no barrier, no dam, no frontier between me and them. The experience of the entirety of life is my experience. I cannot separate from it and that results in a kind of intimacy and closeness that really has no possible definition. I cannot go anywhere where I am not and I can't not be everything. Sometimes a part of my psyche wants to take a break from all of this crazyness and just wants to run away, because really, there is so much of it. Funny enough, even this whole mass of suffering has its own flavour, its own poetry, its own savour and sweetness. I find more and more things are simply funny and so not serious, because I know I'm not caught in it, in all this carnival ride. And so, the carnival ride is fabulous, since I can enjoy it for what it is.

I lost an enormous amount of definitions of myself. If anybody told me now that I am this or that, I simply wouldn't understand it or take that to be true. I mean, for the sake of conversations, I can say that I am a 27 years-old guy who does this and that and looks like this and so on, but that is a social convenience, I know I am not that. I am ME and I am here, always here. These are the only things I could think of that would reflect reality. I do not understand more of enlightenment or realisation or awakening. If anything, I have become dumber in that regard. I know less then I knew and I don't care at all. There is no need for understanding, no need for becoming something, getting something, grasping something or letting something go. In all cases, in all possible circumstances, the only things that are true about me are that I am ME, I am HERE, and that's enough. No need for more. And it's seriously funny that that should be enough, but it is.

I guess my point would be this: no matter how your understanding turns out, whatever your experience might be, whatever happens to you in terms of becoming something, just keep looking at yourself. You're here, always here, simple, plain, irritatingly natural, you. Look at that no matter what happens. And then, wether you discover the elixir of Gods or the mud of the peasants, you'll know the truth. And that, that makes everything worthwhile.

Well said by both of you guys, female or not. Complete understanding may not be an essential ingredient to good results from doing the inquiry, but it makes for good reading. I hope you keep it rolling. Trimpi

The only thing I'm able to understand in any way is that I am ME, and I am HERE. Nothing else is able to make any sense to me--I cannot figure out anything else at all. I find that the machinery of asking "who, why, what?" keeps going and going. And the only conclusion or "answer" that I can come up with and that makes sense is that I am ME and I am HERE. No other explanation or answer is available to me.

I can relate to what Dragosghitiu said about definitions falling away. I am experiencing that as well--I find that I am ME, and no definition can encompass that. Words are a tangled web that point to no truth at all. Definitions are nothing but words. I am also becoming dumber, because words fail to explain anything. My mind wants words and searches for words to explain the mysteries of life. But I cannot believe any of these explanations and none of them hold up from one day to the next. My only conclusion always returns to I am ME, and I am HERE. It's very frustrating at times, and very liberating at others. It's quite the conundrum, but that's the way the carnival ride plays out.

I am grateful to everyone here as companions on the road to nowhere.

Jenny