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Each moment Life streams through the gates of the senses, fresh and new. That’s CONSCIOUS CONTACT. Then the mind hijacks it, saying, “I am what’s in conscious contact. I am doing the seeing, touching, thinking.” The mind’s modus operandi is CLAIMING. There is life and it’s happening; then the mind claims that life. Now life is happening to me. A bird flies by. There is simple consciousness of it. Seeing happens. Then the head says, “I saw that.” WHO is seeing --- the sense of being the one seeing --- becomes more important than SEEING itself. The conscious contact is being claimed by the head. It puts you to sleep to the awareness that you ARE the conscious contact. “Selfing” is parasitic. It’s taken over. You may be looking FROM it all day.
What’s looking is what you’re looking for. --- Saint Francis of Assisi
Life is a VERB. It’s just happening. Not TO anyone. Just energy, riffing like crazy. Selfing makes a NOUN of itself. A thing through body-identification. The illusion of being a noun is that everything is happening from outside TO YOU. All day, every bit of conscious contact that is continually happening, your head is claiming it, as YOU (the body) being the one in contact. But the “self” is just a story the mind’s running. Nothing ever happened to what I AM. I am the pure and simple AWARENESS of events. Life is happening; it’s a verb. The verb is the reality and the noun is the illusion. You are looking at it from the point of view of being a noun so you’re missing it. That’s what your head is doing all day: INTERPRETING what is going on and making it into a story about something else. You lose the verbing of life as soon as the noun claims the experience as something that happened to it. You can drop down into verbing and see the noun in action. See it on its throne. The verbing doesn’t stop; it’s always on. There is not a “past of presence” nor a “future of presence.” There is BEING. Now.
Awareness is the CONTEXT of life. What you incorrectly call “self’” is a CONTENT. Planes don’t bump into the sky. “Hey, I almost hit some sky.” No. Rain comes, the sky doesn’t get wet.…
Take a bowl. Put things in it; make soup. Does the bowl change? No, no more than the bowl of sky does when the birds and stars move through. No more than the mind does as thoughts flow in and out. This…
You ARE that SPACE, entertaining the conscious awareness of what’s appearing each moment. But you identify with a mental…
“Why is life happening to me this way?” Because you’ve construed yourself as a part of the soup when you’re really the context, the bowl. Life seems to be happening TO you, as the soup, a whole drama of not enough spice and so on. You see life’s content but miss the context in which it’s held --- the freedom that is ‘prior to’ the self. You see the stars but give little…
The ego uses seeking as a stratagem to hide your true identity. It knows you won’t “find…
The bowl has a purpose: It holds. You ARE that space. The conscious space that is aware and conscious of what’s appearing in it. Holding all the appearances that are happening as they pass. But we’ve identified with a mental process that says “I” am part of the content, floating around in the soup. The soup is happening to me. Your life becomes a storage unit full of mental memorabilia…
There has to be an application of new glue every day to rebind your mind to the idea of your being a self. Because it’s all smoke and mirrors. The makings of selfing…
AI Summary
The Escape to Everywhere by Paul Hedderman presents key insights from the Taoism tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
- [To be expanded]
Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
This entry was generated from Readwise highlights. Expand with additional context as appropriate.