Hi Murtaza

But you don’t doubt this. You “know” with certainty that certainty is not possible,

I was wrong to question your experience of doubt. My thought was that you had built up a catch 22 self validating loop that your well-developed mode of ‘knowing’, the mind, can’t break you out of.

I honestly have no idea how to make it happen in real life, at one point i think you said, its not something you choose, from the story it seems that luck/randomness made the sparrow realize, what if he wasn’t lucky enough? What if there is another sparrow that didn’t had this realization?

When we use a world like ‘choose’ we tend to imagine a clear intention attached to a specific outcome, initiated by a force of will to ‘made it so’ always open to disappointed when it doesn’t turn out exactly as we expect.  Such an experience of choice is a product of mind and for many of life’s choices works just fine.  However it doesn’t work so well when we find ourselves stuck, especially when it was the reasoning mind that got us stuck.

So difficult to explain… The sparrow after all its striving lays disappointed and depressed on the ground.  In this state of mind/being, it is not capable of noticing the breeze that points to a way out.
Noticing the breeze is NOT a random act of luck as it requires work. (It will take work to release the mind and allow ‘flow’ – other ways of ‘knowing’ – to ‘speak’, which was always present, just not noticed. – Thus it is said we return home and ‘know’ it for the first time. Such is the realization of all illumination.)

The unconscious has noticed the breeze long ago but the Minds attachment and self validation to what it ‘knows’ keeps it from “hearing” other experiences of ‘knowing’. Sure From the point of view of mind/ego ‘letting go’ of what it knows can be experienced as giving in to random chance and losing control, its not even sure it has, and so it resists.

The sparrow could give up, as the number of bones laying around suggest those the came before have done. Instead, the sparrow’s act of well, its choice, is to be still and be quite.

The self-validating mind has not found the way out and so the sparrow asks it to be still and to wait.
To do this sparrow notes it feelings of disappointments and depression and detaches. The Sparrow has emotions and experiences but is NOT its emotions and experiences.
The Sparrow notices the past and how it got to where it is and detaches from that as well (It does not disavow the experiences  but refuses to judge or measure. By not judging a labeling the experiences are noticed and allowed/free to flow).
As for the imagined future the sparrow has no time for it, yet doing so this is not a detachment from hope or intention. The intention of allowing the future and not grasping is a difficult tension hold.  The art of allowing is not a surrender to random chance or control/intention as ones eyes and ears* are always open. Allowing involves a surrender to attaching and labeling which blocks flow, not a surrender to apathy or indifference.

Allowing does not ignore the past or feelings but a loosening of their grip so that the Sparrow might empty itself. Its in that space that the ‘heart’ and ‘gut’ can be heard. New information.

The work of ’emptying’ and ‘allowing’ is far from leaving things to chance and randomness. It involves a full participation.

*Another riddle. ‘I’ do not see, eyes see. ‘I’ do no hear ears hear

• This reply was modified 3 years, 1 month ago by Peter.