Matt, How can there be effort involved in realizing you have spaced out? Serious, not mystical/rhetorical question. I know for me, there I sit, there I know I was lost in the generated thoughts, and there before me is a perfectly fine moment to be not lost in. The awareness itself is the return to awareness. I just can't figure out a way to match "effort and thinking" to the bolt of knowing that you were not paying attention. I don't come back to the Awareness, it keeps finding me.
Thanks, Chris On Wednesday, February 1, 2012, mattmodrow <[email protected]> wrote: > Hey there. I am glad that you found our dialogue interesting. But, I think there may be a chance you misunderstood what i was saying about my own practice. When I come back to Awareness there IS thought involved AS WELL as effort. It is just that when I "come back" I try not to think the phrase in my head in the words "just come back," or "come back." So, yes, I am just coming back to Awareness, but the effort I am trying to distinctly make is so that I am not doing it conceptually with words in my head, I am trying to just complete the process of coming back to Awareness without "thinking the words." If I misunderstood you, I apologize, but it does take both effort and thinking for me to come back, it is just the matter of how I do it. > > --- In [email protected], mike brown <uerusuboyo@...> wrote: >> >> Matt and rewrisk, >> >> I have found your recent dialogue quite interesting and thought-provoking (in a good way ; ) ). While I was in India, quite recently, I became interested in the teaching of Ramana Maharshi and Nisaergadatta Maharaj. I'm finding that what you've both been writing about here creates a synthisis of these master's teaching. rewrisk's talks about "reflective awareness" and Matt talks about coming back to awareness without thinking. This 'coming back to awareness' without concious effort seems to cancel out the 'reflective' aspect of rewrisk's "reflective awareness" and recreates the 'state' the 2 above masters refer to in their teachings. In other words, just awareness itself is what is left and you are that. Hope I didn't manage to misread or misrepresent what you both wrote earlier? >> >> Mike >> > > > > > ------------------------------------ > > Current Book Discussion: any Zen book that you recently have read or are reading! Talk about it today!Yahoo! Groups Links > > > > -- Thanks, --Chris [email protected] +1-301-270-6524
