A Quiet Time

[Wendy Farmer-O'Neil]

An integrative approach, that helps avoid flattening our experience and
understanding of the world, would suggest that both insights are true.  It's
relative ;-). Energy/light behaves as both a wave and a particle/packet. As
Ken Wilber might put it, the experience of One Taste, or as Harrison says,
one big ever-present NOW, where there is no separation (wavelike form), is
always accessible to us.  The discrete packet-like experience of the
contracted self, is also real.  They co-exist. And both need to be honoured
and attended to for health and well-being.        

An example of this is one of the stories about the death of the Buddha.  It
goes like this:  The new students, those who had just received instructions
and begun to meditate, when they heard of the Buddha's death, cried.  Those
students who had been studying for several years and who had attained a
measure of mastery, did not cry. Those who had been with the Buddha for a
long time and who were awakened themselves, cried.

Ken Wilber talks about this a lot in his book, One Taste--how the experience
of being in One Taste co-exists with the sensations and emotions of the
contracted ego-self.    

The experience of NOW, opens our hearts--both to greater intensity of joy
and pain.  It awakens our compassion for all conditions--and reveals our
inner expansiveness to hold all contradictions, all possibilities, all
realities (kind of the ultimate open space). 

So, when you ask, "A skin encapsulated consciousness?" I resonate, "Yes!
What a Mystery! What an impossibility!"  And when you say, "We really
inter-penetrate--we inter-be", again I resonate, "Yes! What a Mystery! What
an impossibility!" Ain't life cool?

Knowing nothing, just thinking stuff,
Hugs,
Wendy



  
-----Original Message-----
From: OSLIST [mailto:OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU] On Behalf Of Jimmy
Pryor
Sent: March 3, 2006 6:43 AM
To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU
Subject: Re: A Quiet Time

Paul,

Where is the you that perceives and touches.  Does it begin at the 
boundary of your skin?  A skin encapsulated consciousness?

Is the light of the sun old light?  Or just light that left the sun 9 
minutes ago?  Where does the sun begin and end?  Since we are effects 
of the sun, could we say that we are part of the sun's body?  (Hence 
the name of my business: SunBody.)

Thich Nhat Hanh says that we are "I" am composed entirely of "non-I" 
elements.  All of the elements of my body came from somewhere 
else.  And when I read your email, you're thoughts become part of 
me.  "This is not my body, my body is not me."

In a Buddhist conception of mind and consciousness, there is the type 
of communication that you describe in which our perception of the 
other is mediated through light and thought.  But, there can also be 
be unmediated direct perception.  This doesn't fit well with 
Newtonian physics, but quantum physics does recognize this.

One way to express all this is to say that the idea of a separate 
self located in a particular time and space is an illusion, whereas 
we really interpenetrate - inter-be as Thich Nhat Hanh says.  We are 
all each other all the time.  That is not to say that hugging and 
touching is not enjoyable and beneficial.

Jimmy

At 03:24 PM 3/2/2006, you wrote:

>When we we see an impossible-to-fathom galaxy far, far away, we 
>don't really know that it exists in our now because it took millions 
>of our years for the light from that galaxy to reach us.  Millions 
>of years of linear time have passed for that galaxy.  It is really

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