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Peter
ParticipantHi Anita
I think I see where you’re coming from, but I meant something a little different. The reference to the Serenity Prayer “accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can” frames the tension as something to either endure or overcome. I don’t feel its so much about changing or accepting, but about holding and being with the tension itself without trying to resolve it, or require a leap. Not as a problem to fix, but as a doorway to something deeper.
Camus refusing the leap, not because he’s passive, but because he’s choosing to stay with the rawness of the experience. That holding becomes a kind of clarity, even if it doesn’t offer answers. So maybe it’s less about resistance or surrender, and more about presence that allows us to soften our stories.
Peter
Participantcorrection – I might add a refusal to articulate it away, fix it with words.
Peter
ParticipantHi Anita
“If emotions are the brushstrokes, and the canvas is what holds it all—always there – Is the canvas like a steady, unchanging parent? A presence that doesn’t leave? A super-parent? A God?”I think the canvas can feel like a steady, unchanging parent or even like G_d but only when we’re viewing it through the lens of relationship. The temptation here might be to start thinking of the transcendent as a noun. In non-duality, though, the canvas isn’t other (or a noun). It’s not separate from the painting, or from us. It’s not watching over us; it is us, just as much as the brushstrokes are. In that sense, we are both being held and are the holder… that never leaves…
It’s hard to talk about as any attempt to describe it is already a step away from it…
Camus came to mind as the question implied that a leap to a “higher” meaning might be necessary. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus defines the absurd as the tension between our deep longing for meaning and the universe’s silence. His concept of “the leap” is the move toward religion or metaphysics to resolve that tension in order to escape the absurd by positing a higher order.
Camus refuses the leap. He insists on staying with the absurd, without appeal to transcendence. Yet in doing so, he’s still holding the tension, he’s not denying the longing, just refusing to resolve it or fix it. I might add a refusal to articulate it. In that way, even his refusal becomes a kind of reverence. It points beyond itself, not by escaping the absurd, escaping the tension, but by fully inhabiting it. Not a leap as we general understand the word leap yet could that be a experience of transcendence? Maybe…
Peter
ParticipantA comment on non-duality and its relationship to illusion.
Non-duality resists language because language itself is dualistic, built on distinctions, categories, and measurements. In the experience of non-duality, these dissolve and there is no subject and object, no observer and observed just being.
But the moment we try to describe it, we reintroduce separation. The words become a map, not the territory. And in that shift, the experience can feel like it vanishes as if it was never real, just an illusion. Not because it wasn’t true, but because truth in that state doesn’t leave residue. It doesn’t cling. It doesn’t explain itself.
So we’re left with the paradox: the impulse to speak of the non-dual ends the non-dual experience and yet, we speak anyway because something in us remembers.
Peter
ParticipantHi Anita
I’m hesitant to break into a stream of consciousness exercise but word ‘ILLUSION’ called out.The word illusion can feel so heavy, and sometimes used in ways that are maybe misleading. I agree it can sound like it’s saying our experiences, our longing, our grief, our joy aren’t real. But maybe it’s not that they’re unreal, just that the illusion is that such experiences are only part of the whole story and we don’t notice.?
From where we stand this moment in 2025 (a moment that contains within all imagined moments), in these fragile, feeling bodies separation is deeply real. We ache for connection, and yet often if it comes, as you note, it can be overwhelming. Too much. Too raw. And yet, that ache itself points to something: that we know, somewhere deep down, that everything is connected.
Maybe what non-duality asks of us isn’t to deny the pain of separation, but to hold it alongside the truth of unity. Life seems to be asking us to live in that tension – to feel the turbulent waves of emotion and still remember the ocean beneath it. To honor the heartbreak and the wholeness. Not to escape the human experience, but to see it as part of something larger, something already whole.
Put another way: The illusion isn’t that the painting isn’t real but that it forgets its on the canvas. Life asks us to hold the tension between the vivid brushstrokes of our experience and the quiet presence of the canvas beneath. If only so we remember, and in remembering just maybe our stories begin to soften.
Peter
ParticipantHI Anita
To your point “Your philosophical and poetic reflections could act as a shield, elegant and thoughtful, that sits between you and raw vulnerability.”As most such things it has been both and neither. Today I no longer view it at a shied if only because it hasn’t worked as one 🙂 If anything the reflections have increased my sense of isolation. My family would reject most of what I have written and not understood.
So the pondering has changed little of what is “painted” but has restored a relationship to the canvas… ( I sleep a little better and handle panic attracts a little better) The tension between remains and I can only try to hold the tension without seeing it as something broken. It is and I am That.“I’m having this image of a blank canvas full of dark colors, representing the ache and I’m nowhere to be found on it. The ache feels heavy, unbearable… until someone, with a few brushstrokes, paints me onto that canvas. What a relief: there I am. I didn’t know I was there.”
I have lived in that space waiting for someone to paint the brushstrokes… if only I could see myself… We live our lives reflecting and reflected the illusion of separation between the observer and the observed… But… What if the brush has always been in your hand? What if the ache isn’t a void, but a whisper reminding you that you are already on the canvas, even if the colors feel too dark to see?
I use too many words… I return to the riddle..
We are “bigger then big and smaller then small and we have it ALL” where in each breath, we can simultaneously feel expansive and grounded, infinite and finite, everything and nothing… avoiding the tension we tend to notice only the what is causing us grief or the one we wish to escape to. The observer the observed lost in the painting and forgetting the canvas and or running from both.
How often we get caught up in the details of life (the painting) and forget the underlying reality or awareness (the canvas) that holds it all. We are, I am That. The painting and the canvas. not as separate but one.
That is not comfort in the sense that we tend to seek comfort. Comfort as a release from pain, fear and uncertainty. It is the tension of ache Life asks us to hold. Maybe their is a kind of comfort in that… We may feel alone in our wonder and our pain, but were not when we remember.
Peter
ParticipantSynchronicity the Center Action and Contemplation daily mediation I think speaks on this. I don’t think they will mind me sharing
The Dazzling Darkness of Unknowing – Wednesday, July 16, 2025
Reflecting on the wisdom of the mystical traditions, theologian Douglas Christie writes of spiritual darkness:“In a dark time, the eye begins to see,” says Theodore Roethke. [1]… This brings us close to the heart of how Christian mystics have long understood the task of seeing, especially the seeing that becomes possible in darkness. Gregory of Nyssa refers to this as the “seeing that consists of not seeing.” [2] Dionysius the Areopagite speaks of the “brilliant darkness” that one enters “through not seeing and not knowing.” [3]… The contemplative gaze nourished in the night is open, receptive, and free. Darkness subverts the all-too-common inclination to determine (or overdetermine) reality to fit our own narrow understanding of things. It invites instead a way of seeing rooted in simplicity, humility, and awe….
Is this perhaps a kind of faith? Not simply a denial of faith or an assertion of faith’s impossibility, but a way of thinking about and struggling with the most difficult questions, especially those arising from fragility, pain, and absence?…. What emerges instead is an awareness that we must let them go and learn, as the author of The Cloud of Unknowing put it, to “rest in the darkness.” [4]
This sounds, perhaps, too simple. As if such rest can be found without difficulty, or that all the night asks of us is to let it surround us with its gentle, healing presence. There is little in our experience to suggest that this is so…. The experience of the night can be terrifying, bewildering, less a place to rest and heal than a dispiriting struggle with pain and absence. Still, there is also something about the enveloping darkness, its silence and stillness and depth, its inscrutability and ineffability, that comforts and soothes, that releases us from our compulsive need to account for everything, explain everything. [5]
Translator of the mystics Mirabai Starr guides us in the wisdom of Spanish mystic John of the Cross (1542–1591):
When the dark night descends on the soul, its radiance blinds the intellect. She can no longer formulate concepts; she doesn’t even want to. It is tempting to consider this inability to engage the intellect as a failing. It is easy to assume that you are wasting time.
Do not force it, John wrote. Stop trying to figure it out. Drop down into a state of guileless quietude and abide there. This is no time for discursive meditation, no time for pondering theological doctrines or asserting articles of faith.
Your only task now is to set your soul free. Take a break from ideas and knowledge…. Content yourself with a loving attentiveness toward the Holy One. This requires no effort, no agitation, no desire to taste her or feel her or understand her. Patiently persevere in this state of prayer that has no name.
“Trust in God,” John wrote, “who does not abandon those who seek him with a simple and righteous heart.” By doing nothing now, the soul accomplishes great things. [6]
Peter
ParticipantHi Anita. Great questions
Yes, I know that nothingness inside. That hollow, alone space. There are times when the mystery feels too vast, and I long for something more tangible. The heart aches, even as it knows. The soul whispers “yes,” but the body feels tired, small, and unseen.
Do I feel I belong to something greater? I think this is where language begins to fail. The word greater implies measurement, and the experience I’m pointing to is beyond labels. It’s not something I can hold and define. As I mentioned earlier, the heart still aches even when the mind “knows.” So I hold this as a kind of living tension, not something to fix, but something to stay open to. (The wisdom traditions suggesting that holding the tension opens to what Gurdjieff might call the third force. The ‘force’ which encountering the tension of duality dissolves it into something else.)
And no, this doesn’t make me less needy of human connection. If anything, it might deepen the ache. To be candid, I sometimes wonder if writing about these things is a way to avoid that ache, but it doesn’t. It just brings me closer to it.
How to explain… Alan Watts once said, “What you do to the Earth, you do to yourself.” I used to read that as a kind of environmental ethic, where I still saw myself as separate from nature. But when I let go of that separation, the meaning changed. If I am the Earth, if I am everything, then what I do to the Earth, to others, to the world, I do to myself.
When I see bombs being dropped, I am That. When I see a child starving, I am That. When I see someone holding that child, I am That too…
It’s not a comfortable realization. But it feels true. And maybe that’s what belonging really is, not comfort, but connection. Not escape from the ache, but presence within it.I understand when someone might say what’s the point then if in the end that ache and that experience of nothingness inside remains. I don’t have a answer for that. I still get angry and frustrated only not so much now. No that’s not it, the anger and frustration is part of the ache returned to the ‘canvas’.
Maybe the ache not a flaw in the system, but is the system. The anger, the longing, the emptiness brushstrokes on the canvas of being.
And the canvas itself still, silent, unchanging holds it all….There’s no easy answer and maybe that’s the task: not to answer the question or resolve the ache, but to relate to it differently. as Rilke said “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves” holding the tension something shifts, though not always in the ache itself, but in how we hold it.
All these words and I’ve said very little and nothing new.
Peter
ParticipantA comment on my comment: “I think both perspectives are true and necessary part of our unfolding. The psychological healing of reclaiming our innocence a step toward being able to glimpse that deeper unity.”
I don’t think this unfolding is a linear process. The shadow work we do may bring us closer to the experience of oneness, but more often, I think, the experience of oneness is a happening, a moment we don’t will, but simply notice. And even if it lasts only a moment, it leaves a mark. It informs and deepens our shadow work, softens our judgments, and reminds us that even our wounds are part of the whole.
Peter
ParticipantHi Anita
I really appreciate what you shared and the psychological and emotional lens through which you viewed the phrase “When I see I am you, how can I harm you?” You’re right, it can be incredibly difficult to see innocence in others when we struggle to see it in ourselves. I feel that is a aspect of our shadow work, where we wrestle with seeing both the best and worst aspects of ourselves and instead project them onto others. In projection, the last thing we want to, or maybe capable of doing, is to see others as ourselves.What I was pointing was something a little more like the spirit behind the word Namaste “The divine in me recognizes the divine in you.” Or even deeper, There is no me and you, only This. As the Upanishads say: “Tat Tvam Asi” “Thou art That.”
It’s not just about seeing my goodness or badness in you, but about seeing that we are not separate at all. That at the deepest level, we are made of the same light, the same breath, the same being. Each of us a arising and returning to the canvas. From that place, harming you would be harming myself. Its a moment of non-dual realization, where the illusion of separateness dissolves (as would any measurement, like innocence), and compassion arises naturally, not from similarity or shared traits, but from oneness.
I think both perspectives are true and necessary part of our unfolding. The psychological healing of reclaiming our innocence a step toward being able to glimpse that deeper unity.
One of the intentions behind the blank canvas post was to point to this shared truth across wisdom traditions. That this realization of oneness is not exclusive to any one path, but a shore we all seem to be sailing toward. A unifying current beneath the surface of our many stories.
Peter
ParticipantPart two: unity: Each wisdom traditions seem to relate to the notion of the power of sound, word, and silence as vehicles of creation and connection to the divine. I wonder then could the relationship between wisdom traditions bring unity.
In Jewish mysticism, especially Kabbalah, the Tetragrammaton – YHWH – is considered the unutterable name of God. Not fully pronounceable, lacking vowels, which preserves its mystery and sacredness. Sometimes YHWH interpreted as a breath-like sound, suggesting that God is as close as our breath—a presence beyond form or articulation. YHWH is also associated with the creative power of speech: In Genesis, God speaks the world into being (“Let there be light…”). Aligning with the canvas metaphor, YHWH as the canvas and the breath, the sound before sound, the word that contains all words.
In Hinduism AUM is the primordial vibration from which all creation arises. It is both sound and silence, form and formlessness. It’s chanted to align with the cosmic rhythm and is considered the seed of all mantras.
In Christianity there is the notion of the Logos: “In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Logos is the divine reason or creative principle and Christ identified as the incarnate Logos, the Word made flesh. This reflects the idea of divine sound or thought becoming manifest, the paint on the canvas of creation.
In Sufism God has 99 Names, each a vibration or attribute of the Divine. The Name “Allah” is said to contain all other names, and its sound is considered transformative. The practice of dhikr (remembrance) involves chanting or breathing the names of God, returning to the source of being.
From the Tao Te Ching: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.” The Tao is the source of all things, beyond language and form. Here naming is seen as the beginning of duality, while the Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth. This reflects the canvas before the paint, the sound before the word.
Many Indigenous traditions view language as sacred where to speak is to invoke. Stories and songs are not just entertainment but acts of creation and memory. Here Silence is often revered as the space where spirit speaks.
I feel these relationship of sound and word, canvas and paint transcends dogma and theologies, a unifying insight that lies at the heart of many mystical and contemplative traditions. The idea of separation as illusion, and that compassion naturally arises when we perceive the underlying unity of all things.
At their mystical core the traditions point to a primordial source (sound, silence, breath, word). A shared essence that transcends form, identity, and belief. The illusion of separateness being the root of suffering and realization of unity as the path to compassion and liberation. This realization is not intellectual, it’s experiential where the ego softens and the boundaries dissolve and what remains is Love, Compassion, Presence, Stillness, Silence…
Compassion the natural response when we see others not as “other” but as expressions of the same source. Compassion no longer a moral obligation, it becomes inevitable.
“When I see I am you, how can I harm you?” This is echoed in:
Buddhism realization of anatta (no-self).
Christianity “Love thy neighbor as thyself” becomes literal when the self is seen as universal.
Sufism where the lover and the beloved are one
Kabbalah, the divine spark is in all beings.The canvas the shared ground of being, pure awareness, the Self, the Tao, the Divine. The paint the diversity of forms, language, culture, identity, belief. When we mistake the paint for the whole, we see separation, When we remember the canvas, we see unity and compassion flows.
“Thou art That”
Peter
ParticipantHi Everyone
Finding that I have nothing new to say I thought I would expand on the Blank Canvas with the aid of AI see if various wisdom traditions might relate to the idea.
In Jungian terms The “blank white canvas” functions as a symbol of the Self, the totality of the psyche, both conscious and unconscious. The word Self a archetype of wholeness, the unchanging ground from which all psychic content arises and to which it returns. The canvas, though seemingly empty, contains all potential, just as the Self contains all aspects of the personality, realized and unrealized.
“The canvas contains within it every painting that has been and will be created.” This realization mirrors the Platonic idea of forms and Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious—a realm of archetypal images and potentials that exist beyond individual experience.The idea that “nothing is lost, nothing gained, nothing to fear” a realization of being present (Eternal Now), often symbolized in Jungian psychology by the mandala, a symbol of wholeness and the eternal cycle of becoming. The canvas, like the mandala, is both empty and full, static and dynamic.
Exploring the notion of AUM as the sound of ‘one hand clapping’ and every word that has and will be spoken.
AUM is considered the primordial vibration—the sound from which all creation emerges. It is not just a sound but a symbol of totality where:
• A represents the waking state (conscious mind)
• U represents the dream state (subconscious)
• M represents deep sleep (unconscious)
• The silence after the sound represents pure awareness, the Self beyond formAUM the sound-canvas from which all spoken words (forms) arise and to which they return. The Sound of One Hand Clapping, the Zen paradox meant to transcend dualistic thinking by inviting the mind to confront the limits of logic and language. In the context of AUM, One hand clapping is the unmanifest, the potential before form. Two hands clapping is the manifest, the world of duality, sound, and form. So, AUM is both the sound of all sounds and the silence of no-sound: the canvas and the paint, the hand and the clapping, the word and the silence between words.
Exploring the notion of Language as Paint on the Canvas and how Language constructs our reality. From a psychological and philosophical standpoint, language is not just a tool for describing reality, it shapes it. In Jungian terms, language is a symbolic system that gives form to archetypal energies. It is how the unconscious becomes conscious.
• Words are symbols, and symbols are bridges between the known and the unknown.
• Language filters experience, giving it structure, meaning, and narrative.
• What we can name, we can relate to; what we cannot name, remains in the shadow.The ego uses language to define identity, time, and separation. But the Self, the deeper totality, speaks in images, dreams, silence, and paradox. This is why mystical experiences often feel ineffable as they transcend the limits of language.
In the metaphor of thatCanvas and the Paint, the canvas is pure awareness, the Self, the eternal now. The paint is language, thought, culture, memory, everything that gives shape to experience. Each word, like each brushstroke, reveals and conceals. It brings something into form while hiding the infinite potential behind it.
AUM the sound of one hand clapping the vibration before duality. Language the second hand, the clap, the echo of creation.
The canvas is always blank, yet always full. Every word is a painting, and every silence a return to the source. Let us then take care in the words that we speak and remember the return to silence.
Peter
ParticipantHi Anita
To be candid my posts of late have surprised me with the call to ‘scream’ seeming coming from nowhere and resonating deeply. Holding the tension of one’s paradoxes with no other intention nothing is fixed, the old fears remain but a something else arose. Holding the fear and the clarity of the No and the Yes something else emerged, a something that was not constructed but revealed. The blank canvas, always blank, painting itself. This is how the soul speaks, not in formulas, in emergence, in surprise. The scream not from despair but from truth.
Leaving me to wonder that perhaps healing isn’t the disappearance of wounds but the weaving of those wounds into wholeness. Healing not always making the pain go away but can make it sacred. The wound does not always close, but perhaps it no longer needs to. Perhaps it opens into a space where mystery lives. Where sorrow and beauty are not two things, where a scream isn’t failure but a song.
I note that the Buddha (nor any of the wisdom traditions when not misunderstood) promises that a ‘way’ will fix life, that healing will fix life. The Dharma doesn’t promise that life will stop hurting. It offers a way to relate to that hurt with spaciousness, awareness, compassion. Not as answers but as mirrors.
Each moment met openly reflecting the very thing we most need to see. The wind doesn’t fix you it reflects your resistance, a mountain doesn’t’ offer solutions, it reveals your stillness, wisdom teachings don’t change you, they return you to yourself.
In the past I have approached the wisdom traditions as pathway to fixing instead of allowing. Today I see the teachings as mirrors to reflect the Self back to me. Nature a mirror, teachings a mirror, each of us a mirror… The mirror not an object but a state of being.
So let the mirror reflect, let our screams sound, let healing arrive not as a fix but as a flowering in the soil of unguarded presence. Life is not broken, we are not broken, we are an unfolding.
This feels like a place to pause, contemplate if only to avoid the temptation to cling to what arises or mistaking a path as destination.
I hope everyone enjoys the weekend.Into the gone, into the gone, into the gone beyond. Into the gone completely beyond, the other shore awaken.
Into the gone, into the gone, into the gone beyond. Into the gone completely beyond, the other shore return…Peter
ParticipantHi Anita I appreciate the questions as they mirror my thoughts.
There were a few questions so I’ll start with this one and maybe the others will fade: How do we stay present with emotion—without clinging to it, numbing ourselves, or rushing to fix it? How do we let difficult feelings sing through us… instead of scream “Danger! Danger!” at every turn?
If I have read what you wrote correctly the danger sensed is arising from past experiences (now memory) and is not immediate. If that is not the case and the danger immediate what I write of would not apply. The meditation is intended for the second half of life and the dangers of the past dealt with even if handled badly and their remains a wish of ‘if only’ it wasn’t so.
The thought of the mirror of the moment was to stay in the tension of such questions without intention other then holding it.
Emotional mindfulness reminds us that Emotions are not problems to solved but energies to witness. Here we sit in tension between the witness and our conditioned mind, our habit of categorizing and creating constructs. Observing the tension between the Yes and the No the space between witness and mind may dissolve and a something else arise. Here the observer is the observed and the thought the thinker – a mirror choicelessly aware.
When we don’t intervene with our habitual sorting and fixing, we open ourselves to a different mode of relating to the thoughts and feelings that arise. We do so with curiosity and space not judgment or measure. A space for something new to arise.
It is a difference of being present to an emotion holding space and being present in the emotion as identification with the feeling. Holding the tension, you will notice both. Staying in the tension honors the complexity of our experiences, resisting the urge to resolve or soothe our discomfort the tension becomes a teacher rather than a puzzle to be solve.
“Let difficult feelings sing through us” is a poetic call to metabolize emotion through presence. Where a scream cries out emergency the mind reacts to act and fix. A song, even a sad one, is expression and invitation to stillness in movement, resonance and maybe healing.
The notion I am playing with here is that of being a Mirror to the Moment and allowing what will arise and be seen. A mirror does not choose what appears nor try to fix what it reflects or claim ownership of what is seen.
To resolve the tension a third ‘force’ is required only the force isn’t action., nor can it be it be willed. It can only be allowed which the constructing ego mind is going to resist, thinking action must be a doing certainly not a being. This force is not a push but a rhythm, not will but a welcome. This to is a holding of tension.
The ego equates agency with control, believing doing is superior to being and allowing ia weakness. But this “third” isn’t passive, it’s radically alive, quietly dynamic, and spacious enough to hold contradiction without collapse. To the ego, it feels like “nothing is happening.” But to the deeper self, it’s everything. Presence without grasping. It’s the alchemical vessel where transformation happens because it is not forced…even as the fire heats the contents. (another tension to hold)
The past, the minds constructs, the fears remain, these experiences reside in the tension we hold. The Yes and the No, the like and not like. The meditation a kind of spiritual aikido, meeting the moment not with resistance but with yielding presence. Holding tensions not as weakness, but strength. A willingness to live the mystery, not to master it.
To be a mirror is to surrender authorship. To allow the third is to become a space through which life speaks. To embody this is to dance with the ineffable, not by leading, but by listening.
I seem to have used a lot of words which I fear may be misread as an attempt at understanding and understanding control and create a process to follow…
I can’t deny understanding hasn’t been the driving force of my youth, my ego and hope. A hope that if I understood I would no longer fear and no longer feel lost or alone. I would instead be in control and safe… That has proven to be a fool’s game and one I played badly.
I acknowledge the tension in that and holding the tension sense the rhythm of movement between a No ‘not this anymore’ and a Yes ‘I am still here’, listening.
I see I have named a fear – to be misunderstood. Within that fear a paradox that its ok to feel the pull for understanding and the tension that the point isn’t to not understand but to no longer demand the understanding protect me… I have named other fears, to be lost and alone… the tension of feeling separate from the world I know I’m not separate from.
I may still scream… just not in desperation… a holy scream.
Not a scream of “save me!”, but the scream “I am here!”
Not desperation, but declaration. Not collapse, but liberation.
Not trying to flee the fire but becoming the flame…This too is part of the alchemy: Letting the voice rise, not to demand an answer, but to announce presence. Letting emotion move, not to control, but to release. Letting the scream sound, not to be rescued, but to be real.
So, scream. If it comes, let it come. Not as a symptom but as a signal that you are alive, unhidden, and unwilling to mute what is most vital. Even the soul needs a sound sometimes. Let it be wild. Let it be true. Let it be yours. The sound and mirror of AUM.
Peter
ParticipantFollowing is the meditative or contemplative “practice” that honors both the structural insight and the radical, unconditioned seeing
The intention is to:
– Hold tension without escaping into belief or passivity
– Involve rhythm and interruption (Law of Seven – rythem )
– Engage the triadic forces (Law of Three – Active, Passive, Reconcile)
– Remain choicelessly aware
– Allow insight to arise from direct contact with the realStage 1: Affirming – Conscious Attention (5–7 min)
“I am here.”
• Sit upright. Eyes gently open or closed.
• Become deeply aware of your body, breath, sounds, sensations.
• Don’t seek to change anything. Just affirm the fact of being.
• Let attention embrace the total field of experience.
Think of this as the Active Force: presence, attention, existence.Stage 2: Denying – Letting Go of Control (5–7 min)
“Let it be.”
• Begin to notice impulses to control: to fix posture, judge thoughts, “do it right.”
• Each time such a thought arises, see it clearly, and let it pass.
• Now attend to what is not happening: the quiet, the spaces, the inner silence.
• Release the will, without becoming passive.This is the Passive Force: receptivity, surrender, stillness.
Stage 3: Reconciling – Holding the Tension (10–15 min)
“Yes and No arise together.”
• Sit now in the full paradox: I act, but I do not force. I see, but I do not grasp.
• Feel the tension of opposites: the absurd, the ecological grief, the Yes/No of your life.
• Don’t solve it. Let it burn gently in the awareness.
• Remain as a mirror, not fixing, not escaping.This is the Reconciling Force: consciousness itself. Insight may arise—but you don’t seek it
________________________________________
🔔 Conscious Shock (Built-In):
– At 7 and 14 minutes, sound a bell or chime (or use a gentle timer).
– This mimics the “shock” in the Law of Seven: to awaken you from drifting.
– When the bell rings, ask silently:“Am I here? Who is here?”
This conscious jolt returns you to the moment—not as a judgment, but a refreshing of attention.
Integration (Final 3–5 min)
“What remains?”
– Open your eyes (if closed).
– Let yourself feel whatever remains, not what you think should be there.
– No analysis. No conclusion. Just the afterglow of being fully present, of having held paradox without collapsing into certainty.This is intended as a “practice” of listening to the “music” between Yes and No, between self and world, between rhythm and silence. A place where structure meets silence, where law not mistaken as love meets freedom. A practice that is not done but lived.
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