Is It something you can continually experience?

Hello again,

No suffering at all. I, too, am enjoying the conversation because I'm contemplative as well. I'm in agreement with your statement that all 'emotional' experiences are not lasting; fleeting at best (like our lives) but recently I've considered the possibility of a consistent truth, outside of our human understanding; spiritually embraced and beyond our human perception.
You've mentioned an awareness imbued in every fiber of everything and that this is the one thing that does not change (somewhat quoted), I'm thinking this is part of a simple truth.
If so, then it exists, is obvious in the world and is here for us.
Thoughts?
CD

Great to hear from you Bee, I need to read your post more carefully. I usually appreciate your post all the more after I read them a few times through. I am not sure I am really ready to post what I have written but I can always go back and change it later. And thanks for both you and CD in keeping this conversation going. It’s a good one

A while back I saw an article about Colin Kaepernick, (quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers). It detailed his off-season practice and his relentless pursuit of perfection. The word ‘relentless’ struck me. Here we are discussing (at least a couple of us) whether to meditate or not, whether it is possible to experience It continually. But aren't these side issues? Isn't the real issue the relentless pursuit of truth?

In this relentlessness I feel the only way is to cut your own path. Everyone’s temperament is different and must cut their own path. No one else can cut it for you. I know I get caught up in various daily dramas and have reactions. These reactions are signs of immaturity. Things are not going the way I want. It is kind of a fearful, anxious reality that results from identifying with a frail sense of self. In a relentless pursuit of truth when all these false, self-serving beliefs are put aside there is a sense of ease and freedom from allowing events to unfold unimpeded just as they are. But this takes a shift in identification away from the frail self. In this endeavor it is often recommended to practice inquiry. Who is interpreting and judging everything? They happen but is there an entity that is doing this? We are often told that no such entity can be found but the frail self is nevertheless tenacious. It is like a puppet that reacts to conditions. There may be an illusion of free will but every condition seems to cause an effect. That is how the world is interpreted. But is this who I truly am; a puppet in the realm of cause and effect? No, there must be a source. How does the puppet even know to have a reaction or have the ability to perceive cause and effect relationships? Or, similarly, how does a pigeon know how to collect twigs to make a nest? There must be a primordial source, an essence, a consciousness or intelligence for anything to happen in the first place. But it is beyond the cause and effect mentality of the mind. And so the only thing It could possibly be called is ‘no-thing’. Truth must be this ‘no-thing’ that appears as everything in the puppet mind. Where I stand or how I act is dependent on how relentless I am in staying connected to this understanding .The problem is that the puppet mind cannot actively shift its identification to truth for it’s a puppet! Truth is much too subtle, pervasive and transparently open to be found in a cause and effect manner. The mind must drop all its assumptions; everything. It is only a puppet because it desires things to go a certain way. Without pretentions or desires or any thoughts of past or future the puppet can ease out of its hold. It can put a stop to the fears and anxieties that are dreamed out of ‘no-thing’ and by so doing it can open up to a universal love (as bee mentions). So one path could be to relentlessly relent one’s puppethood and open up to what is right here, right now without the strings. This is where you can finally ‘be as you are’.

It seems that reasoning and understanding can take you right up to this point of knowing that the reactionary self is not right, that instead there should be openness, ease and freedom. And so , at least with myself, there often is a gap between understanding and actual experience. Perhaps, this is where devotion or bhakti yoga has a place. That is why I started such a thread. I am not really in to those type of new age-y videos but when I listen to it in the morning I can get into it, at least momentarily.

kolomo upon reading your post I had noticed an immediate reaction stirring, so..
I had stopped reading it until I had a blank sheet ready to jot down what I felt in the moment in response to your thoughts.
Here goes with this automatic response to what you have written-
Is meditation a side issue?
So what does a living meditation mean to me?
To me it is letting go to whatever degree happens to find a softness with life, no hard and fast rule as sometimes there are still contrary thoughts, beliefs, and pictures within flowing past the windscreen of the current noticing of what is. But generally the mind has taken a back seat and sort of let go of its unconscious calculating thought patterns and learned behaviours. It's just a noticing of this instant only and can be a very relaxed state. But again, no rules whatsoever.

OK. Now onto what immediatly struck me in your 2'nd paragraph.
As soon as I read your thoughts re the relentless persuit it struck something.
Doesn't that phrase have a strong connotation re the future?
Persuit does, do you agree?
Relentless may mean one will keep at it, and so for how long?
If we sense we are Life Itself, why then would we be pursuing Life?
Why wouldn't we simply trust enough to be able to relax into Life?
So if something is of interest at this time then I suppose we do persue it, but being relentless? Seems almost the antithesis of living in the flow as life itself presents to any of us.

So now I'm on your 3'rd paragraph but I am well aware that what I read so far may be the exact opposite of what you meant, but I am logging my reactions as I'm reading what you wrote.

Reactions!
Lovely aren't they, would any of us be human it we didn't have them? Wouldn't we just be a machine or machine-like? I have had a love-hate relationship with my reactions, good ones I love, the bad I really used to hate. But I suppose I have found bad reactions cannot kill me or even really hurt me, it's just the mind thinks they can. But can they?
Had to laugh when I read about the pidgeon as this popped into my awareness - 'how does the homing pidgeon find its way back home without Google maps?'

You state "These reactions are signs of immaturity"; but are they?
Or is it really the way we handle, meaning an allowing of, some of our reactions that is immature? If the latter is true then aren't we all in a school learning how to, putting it quite simply, allow all our reactions? If this is closer to truth then are we not all on the path of this life learning how to allow all of life? So then now this question pops up - Are we not all learning that we are not in this life experiencing, but we are All of this life experiencing Itself? Are we not all experiencing ourself and so gradually becoming conscious we are All, (life)?

Now whether we talk about our egoic unit or our awareness learning that it is All life, is, I feel, in a way a moot point. At different times we sense our own existence as many facets, but why do we then disect ourself?
Why do we ever separate anything, even our own egoic unit, which has me reflecting that as yet have I never met or heard of any person inhabiting here as pure awareness without the unit being present?

As I kept reading your thoughts I see you were engaging in self questioning,
then this rather literary jewelled oxymoron in your sentence unearthed a paradox:
"So one path could be to relentlessly relent one’s puppethood and open up to what is right here, right now without the strings."

Wow!
kolomo you definitely are a superb questioner of life.

Unfortunately we have all been taught by society that around half of all our emotions are bad and unwanted, and we should try to disallow them. I wonder who wrote that law? God? Somehow I do not believe so.

Would there be any road rage if another caused a dent in my car and I was able to feel the emotion of it without the judgement that I shouldn't be feeling this emotion? This would make a different world if we all could stop judging or labelling our own reactions as either wanted or unwanted.
Would any of us ever then even try everything in our power to either stop or even prevent these "unwanted" emotions from occurring.

In the extreme cases like when we have been intentionally insulted by another, what would be the outcome if we allowed the feeling of the bruised ego without the labelling of it as bad? What if we just felt that emotion as the untainted raw feeling it is without applying a judgement to it?
As I see it we are always thinking or believing we are judging another for our feeling, or even an outside condition, but in reality we are always judging our self.
We are judging our own feeling as bad and then disowning 'this source of bad' as coming from our judgement and most often we point our finger at others as the cause and the culprit.
Christ uncovered this aspect of the egoic unit well when he said something like - Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.
In this contextual light, I see sin as the judgement of self, more accurately the feelings of self.

God, Totality, Being All, one can therefore sense the Fullness and Oneness as It Is and includes everything.
So a question I have put to self often is this - Are we the feeling sensors of God? Within our unique ability to sense duality, are we the living sensors of God as it seems apparent that as God is the Total therein lies no duality? If all life acts as God's sensors is there not a greater sin than that of our dissallowance of All our feelings?

My unit's awareness to date:
Love this moment with all that I am regardless what experience 'IT' contains because this moment is 'The Ocean' and my focus regardless whatever it is... is but one of the countless stirrings within 'That Ocean'.

" "If all life acts as God's sensors is there not a greater sin than that of our dissallowance of All our feelings?"

I agree but what about allowing the feeling of feeling that your feelings are immature? Am I over complicating this? "

kolomo you initially asked the above but I was only able to partially answer you and now I note you have ammended your post.
But it was a very interesting question you raised and one not unlike we all have when we find certain feelings arising within, so to now post the completion of what I started...


Yes what happens when you allow even that? You feel it right?
But what is it then we all seem to most often do? We start to analyse our feelings do we not?
So what is it that is doing the analysing?
That's the big question, and then why do we?
In being analytical the mind judges some as unwanted feelings and sometimes within its/our calculating we are blaming others for them, we then deny them, we reject them and we can also hate them.

Initial feelings are true to us and they are raw but it's often our unit's reaction, namely the judgemental thoughts, that take us away from that fresh raw feeling and builds up a story, or three. Then there are the compounding feelings being caused by the ever increasingly complex story.
But with these additional feelings which are like second, third, and fourth generation ones that have been bred by the way we have reacted to our initial feeling, ask the question are they true?
I know from my experience that if a very painful experience is allowed to be felt in its absolute totality, meaning not denying it but rather allowing the feeling, meaning the total depth and expanse of it, gradually that feeling of dread shifts and as strange as it may seem that at first a feeling that can be so intolerable can morph into a kind of "I'm OK with that now". It doesn't affect what it was that happened as that remains, only the way it then affects us.
The feeling can even gradually change to one of which we have such acceptance that it can then actually feel like love.
So why is this?
I do believe whenever we open our feelings up to ourself to fully feel and not try to judge or deflect them, or even at times blame others for them, we actually open them to 'The Ocean of Light', (also our light).
It's actually a very interesting exercise to embark on the total acceptance of feeling one's feelings, to embrace the fullness of them without any denial. One can then sense that what it is that is doing that complete allowing is the hidden me that's always there, but not able to be seen.

Allowing fully, or loving all our feelings - 'It's walking over and experiencing the terrain of one's own landscape'.