TAT Forum

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~ Thanks to CoolFunnyQuotes.com

Experience Playfulness III Here is another list of 10 additional ideas to experience childlike playfulness—the preciousness of fantasy and imagination—as adults. Find the ones that appeal to you and try them! Even if they do not make you laugh up front, assuming there is resonance they will/should loosen you up and prepare yourself for laughter: 21. Have a water fight. 22. Have a theme day, and dress and behave accordingly. 23. Jump in a mud puddle. 24. Look at every object you interact with as if you were three years old and seeing it for the first time, wondering how you could play with it. 25. Make a list of what feeling happy looks like to you, and then endeavor to engage in all of these movements to the best of your abilities (it’s OK to make believe if need be). 26. Make up new rules and try them out religiously for a whole day. 27. Mine your past for play memories: What did you do as a child that excited you? Did you engage in those activities alone or with others? Or both? How can you recreate that today? 28. Play a game! (I post what I like here. Thousands of quality games and creative activities for inside & outside family fun are here. There are also lots of games in the Online Laughter Session Planner). 29. Put on a puppet show. 30. Read aloud to your partner trying on different foreign accents. * ~ Thanks to www.laughteronlineuniversity.com. First 10 ideas. Second 10 ideas.

Embrace Your Mistakes ~ Thanks to Paul Constant. The image comes from Funny Husbands and Wives.

Eye of the Tempest Your life is before you, while Source calls you within. The beauty that lives about you is unmistakable, a beautiful dream, a delicate balance, seemingly eternal. You have seen the beauty from outside the dream, and yet feel still a part of it. That such beauty should bear with it such pain, the pain of knowing it is transient, impermanent … and you hear the whisper, feel the whisper, bear the memory of Being outside the dream. The tempest of your mind rages about you, and in sorrow you know You are not of the dream; and you need not fear what awaits when the tempest passes. The lamentations echo as memories, the clouds disperse, the tempest quiets. You may turn within, holding in your heart a single prayer, a single purpose which serves not the self, which cares not for what may be seen or seemingly lost, inclining the mind not to the tempest but turning your back on the beautiful dream for no one, but Truth for its own sake. May Grace befall you. ~ Thanks to Mike Gegenheimer. Photo from clipartmax.com.

Holy War You are a veteran now With many scars and many medals Your battles are countless Your war seems interminable Perhaps now, You feel you are under siege By some thought or emotion Some pain Some circumstance You feel you are on your last rations Of energy, of effort, of hope But you are a veteran You know The battle always ends, one way or another But the war When did it start? When will it end? You fight so hard, and yet something here does not change Who is your opponent, soldier? With whom are you interlocked, in never-ending battle? Like two palms pressing against each other In prayer Something here does not move Something here is not “other” Not Two, Not Two Who is praying this prayer? The wars of men have come and gone Have ushered in entire eras That have come and gone Blood on the battlefield has come and gone Peace in the aftermath has come and gone But something here has not come and gone There is a war that cannot be won or lost Without victory or casualty Rather than surrender a single battle How do you surrender yourself To that war? This is your Holy War ~ Thanks to "The Hand." Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Clutter "Clutter is the enemy of clarity." ~ Thanks to Julia Cameron. Q: Mental clutter?

A reader wrote that what would make the Forum more interesting would be:

Hearing from people who are searching—and have questions instead of those providing endless advice and "answers." What challenges they are facing. What their doubts and questions are. How they perceive their path is going. What they are doing in their lives. Where they think they will end up. Etc., etc.

Can you help make the Forum more interesting?

Thanks to Michael R. for the set of Reader Commentary questions for the September TAT Forum:

Where are you? Where do you feel yourself to be? Are you inside the body or is the body inside you? Are you inside the mind or is the mind inside you?

Responses follow.

From Sergio F:
"I" is a thought, but it points to "myself," and I am not a thought. Thoughts, perceptions like body sensations, feelings, all that, appear in "mind"/"myself"/awareness. So where is awareness? It's nowhere as a concrete thing, but it's everywhere as the capacity for things to appear.

The concept or feeling of a specific place is not where I am, because awareness is not a thing in space, I guess. The body is in awareness. "The Mind" and "awareness" may point to the same "thing."

From Sarah J:
Funny question because I used to feel my mind to be inside my head, looking out through my eyes, but I don't now.

I experience my mind inside my pain, experiencing the world, my life, through pain. There is a lot of physical pain - nerve damage from a spinal injury and with it a very odd and displaced feeling of the centre of my body; there is a medical term, but I don't remember it. There is pain in my legs but it is from the central displacement I experience and feel my mind is located. I hadn't noticed the change. This only now feels a little uncanny.

I feel guilty about TAT and about answering this question. I have become completely disillusioned with 'enlightenment'. This attitude started to burn during covid. There was a dearth of awareness of the whole narrative not hanging together. I felt cynical about 'awakened awareness' in relation to the covid narrative and manipulated fear. I expected awareness to be aware, mature, not subject to fake contagions of the ego. This may be Maya but there is bullshit within Maya: manipulation, fear mongering, lies.

During a break within a TAT retreat my computer was on. I had a coffee and something to eat. I was across the room and a few of the retreat leaders were chatting together, talking of covid. I wasn't paying much attention but I felt uneasy. I pricked up my ears the way you do when something you identify with, (in this case New Zealand) is mentioned. They complimented our 'success' as if we were a kind of lucky exemplar. They had no inkling anything was wrong with what they were hearing. I don't mean with NZ's false 'success', but the whole palaver....

See Sarah's complete response.

From Isaac H:
Where am I? "Here" is all I can say with any measure of honesty. When the stimulus to see myself as inside the body arises, seeing from that perspective arises, though the opposite seems just as valid. Likewise with the mind. The mind seems more like a thunderstorm, and I'm the air. Or it's a web of mycelium, and I'm the soil. Most of the time though, these thoughts don't occur to me, and I don't see myself as either inside or outside the body and the mind, though it looks like I act more as if "I" am inside the body, or at least co-present with it.

From Colm H:
Where are you?
The best answer I can give to that, is 'here'.

Where do you feel yourself to be?
Again, I feel myself to be 'here'.

Are you inside the body or is the body inside you?
This is a tricky one which seems to almost move depending on where my attention is. In meditation and in quieter times of observation, I can see that the body seems more like an object in the view, so somehow there is a sense like it is outside, as opposed to inside, me. However, when engrossed in day-to-day life, I can easily feel like I am inside the body, like when I have an intense experience and my attention is very focused on the experience e.g. pain, pleasure, fear, etc.

Are you inside the mind or is the mind inside you?
This depends on what the mind is, which I am not fully clear on, and also on what I am, which I am also not fully clear on. I seem to experience a local mind, I refer to it when speaking as 'my mind' where I also seem to experience 'my feelings', 'my thoughts', etc., that seem to be unique to me, so that points to the mind being inside a separate me, somehow in a separate body. However, it is not clear how and where to draw the boundaries and limits on that. On the flip side, I can also observe the processes of the mind, thoughts, feelings, data processing, etc., which implies a higher vantage point to that seeming 'local mind'. The idea of 'me' looks to be a set of experiences held together as memories, projections, images, etc. When looking I can also see that that idea of 'me' is basically a web / mish mash of data. That web / mish mash of data called 'me' also seems to be an observable object in the view, which therefore implies that the idea of 'me' sits inside some kind of larger mind.

From Tim H:
This is a troubling question for me. I know where I am. Right here and in the province of the mind and separation. If nonduality is to be believed or KNOWN the answer is not what mine would be right now.

From BH:
Thanks to Michael R. for reminding me of this destabilizing line of questioning. These are the types of questions I imagine the guy in the zen story was asking the rest of the students at the ashram right before they chased him out :) There is a “me-ness” feeling that feels internal. Internal to what? I am not certain. But I feel the “me-ness” is here and not over there. If I take it as far as I can, what I feel myself to be is a verb not a noun. Because there isn’t a placeable thing anywhere that I can find, although there is a deep sense that some thing is being. There is a seeing and seen, a feeling and a felt, a sensing and sensed but I can’t place them anywhere in physical space besides that space feels a part of the relationship (i.e. “here” and “there”).

Attempting to answer the last two questions, I’d say I am inside the body because it feels in my waking experience that there is the outer world, then a subsequent internal layer inside consisting of my thoughts and feelings and the internal feeling places/screens where they manifest, then another layer even further inside where something is seeing and perceiving it all. I definitely can’t say for sure if that’s the actual relationship, but that’s what it feels like. I cannot place the borders of those layers specifically. My sensations seem to be tied to the body more than they seem to be tied to another body I perceive or the table I’m using to write on. I don’t feel to be inside the mind or reliant on the mind, but I also don’t feel strongly that everything, including the mind, is inside me. I can see logically how you might get to that conclusion, but that’s not what it feels to me. If anything I would say the mind and thoughts and perceptions are outside me with all other phenomena.

From Art Ticknor:
I am here, seemingly at the center of my experience-world, and I am Here/there, at my perpetual abode. I can’t see myself here, but I can feel myself Here/there although the only times I feel the need to do so are when someone asks me a question that strikes me as dead-serious. Then, not wanting to give an off-the-cuff answer, I touch back to the absolute point of reference and wait to see what comes to mind.

My relationship to the experience-world is that I can flip back and forth between viewing through the paradigm or model of being inside the body or of the body being inside me. That flip was precipitated by Douglas Harding doing his tube experiment with me in 2003 or 2004. Before that I had been working with the inside-outside paradigm of the unknown viewer-me being inside and anything in the view being outside. Doing the tube experiment with Harding exposed me to the opposite paradigm of everything in the view being inside me. “Seeing” (intuiting) that those contradictory views seemed equally valid was a watershed moment in the loosening of my faulty beliefs.

The mind to me is the same as the experience-world, including the body. When I saw that looking through either of the opposing paradigms of inside-outside was equally valid, my viewpoint jumped to the top of the triangle above the baseline of those contrary views.

From Chitra D:
The body is inside (my) awareness. It could be said that I am aware of the body, of the thoughts. But more accurately there is an impersonal awareness of the body and the mind (the thoughts & emotions & judgements that rise—spontaneously, it seems. The ego-thought, too, arises in awareness; it says "This body and mind and their problems or glories are mine" and it identifies with a name).

But awareness is not limited by the body or mind. In awareness many things arise and are seen. They also subside into it. That too is seen. Sometimes only silence arises in it.

I may call it "my" awareness, but that does not seem accurate because "my" is a limited concept. When the attention turns to/rests in awareness, there seems no limit to awareness, and no qualities to it.

But then, at times, the attention gets pulled into a strong/turbulent thought or emotion, the I-thought gets tangled with it, the ego arises, and things get confused and an identification with body and mind occurs.

Then again that whole occurrence is observed, and identification lessens & drops away. It's like waves rising and falling. Sometimes the identification/attention is with the wave, but always the wave exists in the ocean and in its essence, the wave is not different from it.

That's the state right now!

From Mark W:
I want to take a different approach and rather than directly responding to this month’s TAT Forum questions, which are burdened by so many programmed beliefs and preconceptions that it’s difficult to know where to begin in trying to provide an answer. Rather, I’ll answer those questions indirectly by first answering the question “Do we possess awareness; or are we awareness?" I’ve come to believe, however tentatively, that I am awareness. While still a relative belief, it seems to be more real, and every time I look it’s always there, without fail. There’s a significance to that.

There’s not much I can say about awareness except it doesn’t seem to be a thing, not physically and presumably not mentally either. I speculate that there might be some kind of intelligence or perhaps a True sense of Self behind it that might be where I’m located, so to speak. But that’s merely a guess on my part. I also wondered if awareness is some kind of connective sensing or seeing process between another dimension and our relative dimension through which I receive intuition. Likewise, I wonder if it is only a coincidence that I’ve read about others attempting to sense or see back through the projected ray to see their True Self. Is the projected ray the same, similar, or somehow connected to awareness? I don’t know, of course, and this is all guesswork and speculation, which I don’t normally do on this topic. I can only try to look and become more vulnerable.

Consequently, I do tend to think that the body and the mind are outside of me although I’m all too thoroughly attached to “my” body and mind and from which I’m all too erratically and slowly detaching – or so it seems. It feels like, in addition, that I am back there behind the head and behind the mind, and even further back from where awareness and maybe intuition and maybe the projected ray come through and connect with a mind that is not me. Truly a world of seeming, to paraphrase Richard Rose.

Q: What are your thoughts on this month's reader commentary? Please your feedback.

Richard Rose described a spiritual path as living one's life aimed at finding the meaning of that life. Did you find anything relevant to your life or search in this month's TAT Forum?

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Founder's Wisdom

Richard Rose (1917-2005) established the TAT Foundation
in 1973 to encourage people to work together on what
he considered to be the "grand project" of spiritual work.

Quotes and Notes III from Richard Rose Audiotapes * Peace of Mind in Spite of Success – Irwin, PA * You have to be ready to pay equally for that friendship. To have things happen, put all the energy in you can possibly put into it without any egotistical idea you should have what you want. Have a reservation that if that’s in the cards, then good, we’ll rejoice. If it’s not in the cards, we’ll keep working anyhow. * ~ Thanks to Shawn Nevins, who commented: "Notes I took from several Rose audiotapes. This must date to 1994-95. Direct quotes are in quotation marks, but the rest I assume is paraphrasing." There are quotes and notes from 20 audiotapes. The first set appeared in the July Forum, the second set in the August Forum.

Jacob's Ladder © 2001 Richard Rose. See this transcript of a talk on the topic by Rose.

Homing Ground Update … A spot on earth where people can do retreats and hold meetings; where the emphasis is on friendship and the search. September 2022: Thanks to a small but steady stream of monthly donations, we ended August at 30.9% of the fundraising goal for 2022. We're behind for the year, however, so please consider making a donation. Our third on-site event of the year is now behind us, so hopefully you'll take the opportunity to visit the TAT Center for the November meeting. I'll plan to see you there! And please consider joining the effort to sustain our Homing Ground for years to come. Shawn Nevins PS: Monthly contributions are a great way to support the TAT Center if making a larger one-time donation seems too much. If you're so inspired, click the Donate button below, then check the box for "Make this a monthly donation" as in the example below: Let's bring this to life! "The job is upon us," Richard Rose said, "and it is worthwhile." To contribute to the TAT Center, mail a check made out to the TAT Foundation to: TAT Foundation PO Box 3402 Roxboro, NC 27573 Big checks, little checks, all are welcome. Or use the PayPal link above (though we lose 2.2% of your donation to PayPal fees). * See photos and more on the Homing Ground page. * In friendship, Shawn Nevins on behalf of the TAT Trustees

Did you enjoy the Forum? Then buy the book!
Readers' favorite selections from seven years of issues.
Beyond Mind, Beyond Death is available at Amazon.com.