Rod to Piet, Heloisa and Maria
Piet, Heloisa, Maria
Maria asked for further
thoughts
on Trying and Letting-go, relative to Habit. I'm coming to feel
more-and-more
that there's a grain of truth in this idea, and it resonates with some
ideas
about consciousness I've been thinking about. I'm intrigued by the idea
that
consciousness arises when something comes along to shake us out of our
habitual
way of perceiving the world. You might say that our habitual
perceptions show
us what we call the mundane World, but they hide much more than they
reveal.
For example,
in art we're
talking about "postcard images" and "Hallmark Greeting
cards." But when a truly original artistic concept comes along, it
really
shakes up our way of perceiving the world (which one art critic called
"the
shock of the new"). Think of Cubism, for example, and how a cubist
painting can shock you out of seeing the world from a fixed, static
perspective.
I think we
usually drift along,
fairly oblivious to most of the texture & substance of the world,
and don't
deviate from our habitual perspective. We approach the world in a
habitual
fashion, which limits what we can see. We can't even conceive of a
different
way of seeing. Then something like Piet's Working Hypothesis comes
along to
suggest that there are many ways of seeing which our habits are
concealing them
from us. So we say, "Hey, this is cool, I think I'll try it." And we
TRY REALLY HARD to flip the switch into a different way of seeing. But
the
harder we try the further away we get.
Why would
that be the case?
Because
TRYING is
exactly the habit from the mundane world that we need to stop!
For me,
meditation provides a
clue for how to flip the switch. In Vipassana meditation, for example,
when we
let-go of trying and simply observe what arises in consciousness we
discover
that there are vast realms of hitherto unknown awareness waiting to be
explored. I think we can apply the same trick of letting-go of trying
in our
everyday life, just as we do in meditation. If we simply let-go of the
habit of
trying, we will suddenly tap into those vast realms of hitherto unknown
awareness.
That's what
I meant when I said,
"Let go...take a chance...and see what arises."
... from Rod