Re: Who's saying what to whom?

[Guest guest]

This post got me thinking, and so I wrote down some stuff, maybe it will be helpful...What meditation/ACT does is better integrate the various parts of your mind. It enables a higher meta-control level of your mind.

Your mind contains many "modules" that are in a sense battling for control. Before meditation/ACT, the module that is loudest wins. After meditation/ACT, "you" are able to listen to all the modules, and evaluate what to do based on your values instead of reflexively doing what the loudest module says to do. Or seeing the world from the point of view of the loudest module.

Who is the "you"? This gets into philosophy and religion, which is interesting but not usually helpful. I would say that "you" and "The Observer" are the same. That, while The Observer seems to be rather impassive about all experience, at some deep level it is also the source of your deepest, most true values.

Our values change over our lifetime, just as "me" changes. "Me" consists of myself as observer, but also the particular ego-identity and memory store of my brain with all its modules with their various proclivities and talents. There is a universal part of "me", which is The Observer, which I think all people have; call it a soul if you like. Then there is the particular part of "me" which is all that other stuff: my brain with it's particular memories and modules.

Our values may change because of life circumstances: the birth or adoption of a child; sickness of a spouse; taking on a new job; losing a job. All these things can radically alter the relative priorties of our values.

What meditation/ACT does is help us to balance our lives in accordance with our values. It helps us to make a choice from a broader more complete perspective on our lives. Examples: an addict wants to use their substance to get high, but instead they are able to sit with the feeling of wanting (this is what "acceptance" looks like) and abstain. An abuser feels angry and feels an urge to lash out at his spouse; instead he has learned to sit with that feeling of anger and not act abusively. A small example: for myself, I sometimes have inappropriate comments pop up in my head in social situations, comments which to me might be funny, perhaps true, but are hurtful in some way, and I feel an urge to say the comment out loud. Lately, I've been able to sit with this urge, not act on it. A typical situation during the day for all of us is choosing "what to do next". With mindfulness, we can make that choice more skillfully. Because we are more able to resist the pull to do the thing that is loudest. Instead, we are aware of our freedom to do a wide range of things, and we can act based on our values.

A choice is just what you choose to do. But our choices are what form our lives. Choices that are mindless can often lead to trouble or despair or stuckness. Choices that are mindful are made in accordance with our deepest values, and can lead to a more fulfilling life.

Being in touch with our deepest values is a process. It evolves over time. It can take some digging to figure it out initially, or some trial and error. You might never be quite sure about what are your "deepest values". I know I'm not sure. But I have a set of values I've identified for myself that seem important to me now, it's my best shot. There are some values that I'm kind of ignoring (things like working on wide world issues of social justice or environmental sustainability). But at least I'm aware I'm ignoring those things, and I might re-prioritize those values later on.

Re: the question of what is The Observer vs. what is your individual personality? I spoke about it a little above, and as I said this gets into religion/philosophy which is not necessarily helpful. But just for fun, here is how I currently think about this:

Here is a talk by Alan Watts that I think is relevant:

Philosopher Alan Watts talks to a group of IBM engineers. Quite interesting.

I liked this Alan Watts talk a lot. He essentially states something similar to what is in the book The God Theory by Bernard Haisch: that we are all incarnated mini-versions of the One Being, but to make it interesting for Ourself, we manage to forget that we are this One being while incarnated, because believing the dream is real makes it more dramatic and interesting.

From how not to be afraid of your own life by Piver.

The Antidotes to Fear

Finding a way to free yourself from explanations and cast yourself into the winds that blow hither and yon, not as an expression of surrender but as one of openness and courage, requires reconsidering the vantage point from which you view your own world. Contrary to what we might think, our will alone does not direct our life. Whatever does is some kind of mystery. The course of our life is determined by coincidence and chance as much as it is by what we think, feel, and hope for. What directs this course seems to be unknowable. Acknowledging this mystery is the very first step in fearlessness. When you make the moment-to-moment effort to detach from your ideas about what is going on and why so-and-so is doing thus-and-such, you let in a breath of fresh air. When you stop telling yourself new and better stories about the meaning of your life and allow yourself to not know, to let things unfold as they will: this is an opening to fearlessness. Instead of being crafted from scraps of perception and history, understanding presents itself to you as a whole. The moment you take your attention off your mind-chatter, you can hear the greater wisdom speaking to you through sudden inspiration, abrupt insight, and the ability to recognize patterns of activity or behavior. It takes courage to listen in this way.

We pay a very high price for holding on to our fears. Over and over, we alienate those we care about, and we don't know why. We create situations that are bound to disappoint. We lose out on opportunities because we're afraid of giving up the security of the status quo. We hold on to long-lost images of ourselves because they make us feel young, important, or affirmed. Most of all, we never get to figure out who we really are and what life is meant to be. In the grip of fear, our day-to-day experiences are held in an endless loop of self-recrimination, frustration, and confusion. When you live in fear, you never get to know the precious being that you are, and you're the only one who can ever do so. At the end of your life, the possibilities for your soul's expression in this lifetime die with you. This is too high a price to pay.

The place to start is by exploring your fears and touching base with their unique qualities and flavors through the practice of meditation. By sitting down, taking a deep breath, and having a good, long look at yourself, you can figure out where exactly to intercede in your thought processes to stop fear before it overwhelms you. You have the perfect laboratory for this exploration and for converting the energies of fear to fearlessness. The best path imaginable, the perfect one for you, is your everyday life, exactly as it is.

From the untethered soul: the journey beyond yourself by A. Singer.

Now imagine that movies are made that not only engage the five senses, but also make your thoughts and emotions synchronize with what's happening on the screen. With this movie experience, you're hearing, seeing, tasting, and suddenly you begin feeling the character's emotions and thinking the character's thoughts. The character says, ''I'm so nervous. Should I ask her to marry me?" and suddenly insecurity wells up inside of you. Now we have the full dimension oftheexperience: five physicalsenses, plus thoughts and emotions. Imagine going to that movie and getting plugged in. Careful, that would be the end of you as you know yourself. There would be no object of consciousness that is not synchronized with the experience. Any place your awareness falls would be part of the movie. Once the movie gets control of the thoughts, it's over. There is no "you" in there saying, "I don't like this movie. I want to leave." That would take an independent thought, but your thoughts have been taken over by the movie. Now you are completely lost. How will you ever get out?

As scary as it sounds, that is your predicament in life. Because all of the objects you're aware ofare synchronized, you get sucked in and are no longer aware of your separateness from the objects. The thoughts and the emotions move in accordance with the sights and the sounds. It all comes in, and your consciousness gets totally absorbed in it. Unless you're fully seated in wirness consciousness, you're not back there being aware that youre the one watching all this. That is what it means to be lost.

The lost soul is the consciousness that has dropped into the place where one human's thoughts, emotions, and sensory perceptions of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell are all synchronized. All these messages come back to one spor. Then the consciousness, which is capable of being aware of anything, makes the mistake of focusing on that one spOt too closely. When (he consciousness gets sucked in, it no longer knows itself as ilsc:I r. It knuws itself as the objects ir is experiencing. In other words, you perceive yourself as these objects. You think you are the sum of your learned experiences.

That is what you would think when you go to one of these advanced movies. At such a movie, you would first get to select which character you want to be. Let's say you decide, ''I'll be Bond," Okay, but once you push the burron, that's it. The burron had berrer be on a timer! You, as you currently know yourself, are no longer there. Since all ofyour thoughts are now Bond's thoughts, your entire existing self-concept is gone. Remember, your self-concept is just a collection of thoughts about yourself. Likewise, your emotions are Bond's and you are watching the movie through his visual and auditory perspective. The only aspect of your being that remains the same is the consciousness that is aware of these objects. It is the same center of awareness that was aware of your old set of thoughts, emotions, and sensory input. Now someone turns off the movie. Immediately, Bond's thoughts and emotions are replaced with your old set of thoughts and emotions. You're back to thinking that you're a forry-year-old woman. All the thoughts match. All the emotions match. Everything looks like, smells like, tastes like, and feels like it did before. Bur that doesn't change the fact that it is all just something consciousness is experiencing. It is all just objects of consciousness, and you are the consciousness.

What differentiates a conscious, centered being from a person who is not so conscious is simply the focus of their awareness. It's not a difference in the consciousness itself. All consciousness is the same. Just as all light from the sun is the same, all awareness is the same. Consciousness is neither pure nor impure; it has no qualities. It's just there, aware that it's aware. The difference is that when your consciousness is not centered within, it becomes totally focused on the objects of consciousness. When you are a centered being, however, your consciousness is always aware of being conscious, Your awareness of being is independent of the inner and outer objects you happen to be aware of.

If you really want to understand this difference, you must begin by realizing that consciousness can focus on anything. That being the case, what if consciousness were to focus on itself? When that happens, instead of being aware of your thoughts, you're aware that you're aware of your thoughts. You have turned the light of consciousness back onto itself. You're always contemplating something, but this time you're contemplating the source of consciousness, This is true meditation. True meditation is beyond the act of simple, one-pointed concentration. For the deepest meditation, you must not only have the ability to focus your consciousness completely on one object, you must also have the ability to make aWareness itself be that object. In the highest state, the focus of consciousness is turned back to the Self.

When you contemplate the nature of Self, you are meditating. That is why meditation is the highest state. It is the return to the root of your being, the simple awareness of being aware. Once you become conscious of the consciousness itself, you arrain a totally different state. You are now aware of who you are. You have become an awakened being. It's really just the most natural thing in the world. Here I am. Here I always was. It's like you have been on the couch watching TV, but you were so totally immersed in the show that you forgot where you were. Someone shook you, and now you're back to the awareness that you're sitting on the couch watching TV Nothing else changed, You simply stopped projecting your sense of self Onto that particular object of consciousness. You woke up. That is spirituality, Thar is the nature of Self. That is who you are.

As you pull back into the consciousness, this world ceases to be a problem. It's just something you're watching. It keeps changing, bur there is no sense ofthat beingaproblem. The more you are willing to just let the world be something you're aware of, the more it will let you be who you are-the awareness, the Self, the Atman, the Soul.

You realize that you're not who you thought you were. You're not even a human being. You just happen to be watching one. You will begin to have deep experiences within your own center of consciousness. These will be deep, intuitive experiences of the true nature of Self. You will find that you are tremendously expansive. When you start to explore consciousness instead of form, you realize that your consciousness only appears to be small and limited because you are focusing on small and limited objects. That's exactly what happens when you're focusing solely on the TV-there's nothing else in your world. If you pull back, however, you can see the whole room, including the TV Likewise, instead of just focusing so intently on this one human being's thoughrs, emotions, and sensory wotld, you can pull back and see everything. You can move from the finite to the infinite. Isn't this what they've been trying to tell us-Christ, Buddha, and the great saints and sages of all time and all religions?

One of these great saints, Ramana Maharshi, used to ask, "Who am I?" We see now that this is a very deep question. Ask it ceaselessly, constantly. Ask it and you will notice that you are the answer. There is no intellectual answer-you are the answer. Be the answer, and everything will change.

I really liked this part: "You realize that you're not who you thought you were. You're not even a human being. You just happen to be watching one." That is what I personally think is the explanation for the mystery of who we are, what consciousness is. I'm not 100% sure of this. It's just my working hypothesis that I think best explains all the evidence. To me, it also says that my personal experience is important, but not SO important. I'm just the locus of experience of one being in a universe filled with innumerable beings, all being simultaneously experienced by this One Consciousness, which is The Observer.

Trippy. Sorry if this offends anyone's religious beliefs. Like I said, this part is just speculation and is not needed for doing ACT.

Here's another link:

Alan Watt's "The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing What You Are", free online PDF.

THIS BOOK explores an unrecognized but mighty taboo—our tacit conspiracy to ignore who, or what, we really are. Briefly, the thesis is that the prevalent sensation of oneself as a separate ego enclosed in a bag of skin is a hallucination which accords neither with Western science nor with the experimental philosophy-religions of the East—in particular the central and germinal Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. This hallucination underlies the misuse of technology for the violent subjugation of man's natural environment and, consequently, its eventual destruction.

We are therefore in urgent need of a sense of our own existence which is in accord with the physical facts and which overcomes our feeling of alienation from the universe. For this purpose I have drawn on the insights of Vedanta, stating them, however, in a completely modern and Western style—so that this volume makes no attempt to be a textbook on or introduction to Vedanta in the ordinary sense. It is rather a cross-fertilization of Western science with an Eastern intuition.>> Hi,> > I'm having trouble with the idea of values and choices. I like this idea that there is a difference between a judgment and a choice and that we should choose our values while ignoring what the thinking part of the mind says.> > I'm just not sure what a choice is. The way I understand it- It is pretty random- Just a matter of saying "I'll have that one". But surely there must be more to it than that. Are these choices made by letting the observing self have a say? Who makes the choice? Is it the thinking me, the true me or is it just luck.> > Once you have made a choice (A week, a year, a decade later), can you decide you made the wrong choice? Can you de-commit? > > I am very confused about this. > > Also one more question. I would like to ask a question about the nature of the observer. When I meditate my experience of the observer is a part of me that is quite blank. That is- it contains nothing - it's just there. But I know that the observer is supposed to be more my true self than my thinking mind is. However, if it is just blank then none of my actual personality can be contained within it. What personality traits can come from the observer? I've only been meditating a couple of years so it is quite likely I don't have adequate experience to comment and this question may seem quite incoherent. > > Any advice would be great> > Thanks,> > Jim>