Rod to Heloisa and Piet

Piet & Heloisa,

I've thought a lot about how to approach the experiment, and this morning lying in bed I got a glimmer of how I'd like to formulate it for myself. It goes something like this:

I propose to spend one full day entertaining a mind-set that is different from my normal way of going about the world. In particular, I propose to seek a dual awareness of both the Immediate Moment and of an expanded time scale including my Remembered Past & my Anticipated Future. I conceive of this approach as a simultaneous exploration of the Depth & Breadth of awareness.

By Depth I mean an intense focus on the immediacy of what is happening in the moment. By Breadth I mean an openness to all my remembered past & anticipated future as it impinges on the immediate moment. Thus, I hope to engage greater awareness of the immediate moment as it is fully contextualized by past & future.

I expect that this contextualized awareness of the immediate moment will be difficult to maintain, so when I feel that I have drifted away from either Depth or Breadth I will gently remind myself to be aware of both aspects.

I see this initial undertaking as a somewhat artificial, but intentional, duality. This duality is analogous to the temporary duality of awareness-of-awareness in Vipassana meditation. My expectation is that by temporarily directing my attention to both the depth of the immediate moment and the breadth of my contextualizing past & future, that I can bootstrap my awareness into a natural state of fully contextualized immediate awareness.

Rod Rees