I am midway through reading Whisperings of the Dragon and it comes to my attention of a repeating pattern I am holding myself in, which you write “is to be avoided at all costs”.
My inner seeing has matured to a degree of regularly being able to witness false behaviors in myself and others and to recognize them for what they are in the moment of seeing.
What I am noticing is when I recognize a behavior (particularly in others but even also in myself), the internal dialogue is very active in immediate self-congratulations on the seeing. I notice this but by that time the ‘interlocking with knowing and doing’ has already happened. This immediately creates quite an emotional disturbance within of self-criticism (is this also a form of self-importance?).
I want to ask how to avoid this pattern. Is the answer simply to keep practicing and practicing the listening to what I can’t hear?
Or can you give further clarification of technique to break this particular holding pattern?
Many thanks for your not-doing in me.
Daroubya
You’ve got to come to terms with the fact that maybe you are not seeing the true essence of what is really being revealed and that your judgments are a habitual social patterning.
The power of seeing automatically delivers the witness to an unbiased state of observation, where judgment is suspended and seeing is what it is; an act of witnessing what appears. Then upon this circumstance, letting it go completely via the fact that seeing doesn’t possess anything. Thus allowing the full circumstance to unfold as it truly is.
The techniques in Whisperings of the Dragon, in relation to coming to terms with your doings and not doings, is exactly that. If you are experiencing a social doing, and tilting it towards seeing, then inner silence is not available via the internal dialogue and emotional certainty being there congratulating itself. This is a doing. A not-doing is void of this.
Self-criticism is self-importance running amok. It is merely just self-pity, covering the anger and arrogance, which are tools that you may be using against yourself as a practice ground to use them upon others.
This may not be exactly as it is but if you take a long, honest look at who you are – and this can only be done by revealing to those around you what you are really doing privately – this will bring everything to the surface; not only for you but for everybody. Here your true battleground will be defined, in terms of who you really are in comparison to who you want to be.
This wanting is false via the fact that when you end up realizing what you want to be is not who you are meant to be. This is the epiphany that all social beings must come to terms with.
Since I have written this book, this has come up over and over again. Intellectual patterning standardizes something magical so as to avoid truly being silent.
This standardization obviously has congratulatory tones connected to it. Be aware to look for what you can’t see and to listen to what you can’t hear, thereby coming upon what you would not really expect.
This in turn will touch you very deeply and bring gratitude upon the your journey.
“Self-criticism is self-importance running amok. It is merely just self-pity, covering the anger and arrogance, which are tools that you may be using against yourself as a practice ground to use them upon others.”
Wow. I have been watching this in myself and others for months recently. I’ve become slightly aware of the dynamic between self-importance and self-pity, but couldn’t quite bridge the two. Lujan has it expressed so directly and powerfully in the above statement.
I’ve watched this very dynamic playing itself out in recent events in the States under a guise of racial tension. The strength of the dynamic is devastating.
It truly is a disguise of arrogance and anger. The topic of the internal dialogue — which turns into conversations with others — is about how mistreated I am, instead of considering responsibility for what needs to be done and where I didn’t do it. On a level of hundreds of people, thousands, this internal conversation creates riots and wars.
It’s so difficult to address, very painful to the heart. So many want the opportunity to use the tools to prove their anger is justified. It may be appropriate anger, but the action taken is where we go wrong.
Dear Lujan,
I hope these words finds you well. I would like to inquire of a phenomenon which has to do with energetic sensitivity to the world at large and the capacity to remain in silence. Although I find myself growing stronger in being unperturbed by arisings of internal or externally projected patterns. Still at times I find myself being saturated by their content. Such projections feel physically painful and in certain moments appear to eclipse my ability to remain in silence. Is one ever completely resilient, or in a state of silent witnessing even when angry, confused or spiteful projections arrive externally?
Kindly,
Martin
phi of infinite wonderful: Not-doing as a meditation, a relaxed observation of what appears. So true!
There is nothing to change externally, nothing to pressure, no faults to find and stew over, and no games to play. Simply observe myself and do what needs to be done without the pressure of the social ‘poor old me in this cruel world’ self until the knowing of what is truly happening arrives.
When this pressure to make things happen internally and externally is released, I see so much more clearly. I know what I need to say and what I need to bring my attention to. I know what to let go and what to hold on to for a time. It fills me with sheer buoyancy and joy to be here and now, and all is filled with purpose: the clouds, people, trees, my hands, problems.
It has got to the stage where my body speaks to me and guides to remember from who knows when this particular ancient bark I need to take, or this pattern in myself that I have to recognise and give a voice to when speaking to my beloved, or to simply hold my tongue when someone is falling into the fray of self indulgence right before my eyes while still lovingly speaking to their heart because I care and wish them well despite their tantrum.
Feeling what arrives in this relaxed way, whether its joyful or challenging, presents itself as a loving gesture of guidance from all that is.
It reminds me of looking at water for some reason, and watching the reflections upon it, then intimately feeling what lies beyond. Nothing. Everything.
it seems to me at this time that not-doing is relaxing. all the analysis of what we have seen or habit to go and think about it is a form of applying tension to it, because we are trying to hard to do something, to do the right thing about it, the right response, be the right person etc… it was during a colonics session when suddenly a whole portion of my bowel suddenly relaxed fully and only then did i know it wasn’t relaxed prior to this, perhaps since i was very young. I saw my mother influence upon me and how it pulled me into my mind, away from a creative potential i have a lot of talent, passion and truth with. I experienced that this doing is tension, whereas seeing and not-doing is relaxation. When i have seen something and i totally relax into the seeing, by knowing it will activate my knowing again in the future if i am to learn something new or act upon it, i can trust it to it’s own evolution. I don’t need to take it as a cue to get involved in it’s trajectory, my response or an outcome… it is such a deep form of trust of self that it is very confusing at first. how waylaid we are as a species to find this confusing, yet it is for so many of us. Even though i have seen this itself, i still get caught sometimes with thinking about things after i have seen something, but it has not yet come to culmination. I remind myself to not focus on it this way, as my focus will create a distortion field, and im not to interfere… It’s like it’s really hard for us to be reminded that we already have these capacities to see and be non-doing, we can’t seem to grasp that we can just stop doing and our greatest wisdom lies there. Control.
“Observe what you are interfering with instead of interfering with what you are observing” – lujan matus.
lots of love
what I forgot to say is that I feel that I love you sincerely
Dear Lujan ,
your last three blog posts – answer to questions of others, really touch me deeeply. Your words alone have moved and shifted me and I experienced first sadness and melancholy, when you said to Gwendolyn that the only thing we can acquire is nothing. I thought “so nothing can be ever changed, the poison around and within me will remain as it is…” Then I remembered that lately I experience thinking about some person just seconds before this person rings me on the phone. I have acquired some level of silence and when another’s intention is focused upon me this appears in me as thoughts about this person.
Then I thought that maybe each time I think of you is because you have thought of me, and that kind of made me sad again because lately I don’t think of you (smiling). I went on with this logic that now when I think of you it is certain that you feel this as a direct knowing as you live within silence fully.
Then I laid down and experienced something very, very clear. In my heart I was next to you. I felt joy engulfing me. You are really very, very gentle! It felt like a dream I had some years ago of you visiting me in the night at my place. I even asked you then on skype why did you come and you told me that I lock (or lose?) myself by inquiring “why” . Yesterday and now it just does not matter at all to me, all that matters is that experience and knowing of internal joy and the wonder that this is what we are really.
Thank you for being here!
As I understand it, one important goal of the Eight Gates, is to dismantle the socially programmed self. It is social programming that informed the idea of who one wants to be. The possibility that who one is meant to be is different from this programmed ‘wanted self’ is a direct threat to the survival of the social self, and that social self will seek to avoid such a breakthrough by sabotaging efforts to that end.
Intellectual patterning, by preventing inner silence, is a brilliant tool to ensure such sabotage -not just in the long term, but as expressed above, in the moment.
In my view, the brilliance in the Eight gates lies in establishing that inner silence as a base of operations first. This state of silence prevents any form of intellectual sabotage. Perhaps it is a bit like winning a battle by cutting off supplies, rather than winning through direct confrontation on the front (where the mind is strong).
To check If I follow Lujan: When the final goal is to respond appropriately, only the social mind will want to interrupt half-way to validate that it spotted what is going on. It will then habitually seek to derive an appropriate response. An appropriate response is not informed by analyzing an observation -or even a seeing. The appropriate response is (as Lujan pointed out), informed by the knowing that follows silence.
I guess that moving directly from silence to a response is the not-doing route uncontaminated by the mind, while moving through mental analysis to a response makes it a doing.
Perhaps a challenge here lies in over-analyzing the stages in the process as milestones to achieve. How I see it is to go for the silence, that brings the knowing or seeing, and that may take some practice.
All the best Daroubya.