Unusual things are happening. A series of people I don’t know try to connect with me in peculiar ways. I am cautious at first, but then decide to talk with one of them. They want to recruit me to help with catching large scale international drug traders. I will play a small but important part in gaining their confidence, and others will collect the evidence and go in for the catch. It is dangerous. I ask why they want me. They say they need someone they can trust, someone who is sincere and honest. There are not many who has the degree of sincerity and honesty they need. I accept, especially since they are going after the largest fish, the ones who often go free when the smaller ones are caught.

(more…)

As part of uncovering who and what we are, we need to meet ourselves where we are here and now. We need to take our own immediate experience seriously. Any journey starts exactly where we are. For real results, we need to be real with ourselves.

And the same goes for our relationship with others. For a real relationship, we need to be real with them about where we are, and we need to meet them where they are. We need to take their experience seriously, no matter how different it may be from our own. (If we are honest and look, we can most often find it in ourselves.) And we also need to take their intentions and goals seriously, no matter how different they may be from our own. (Any advice that comes up for us, whether about goals or anything else, is always for us, not for anyone else.)

As we treat ourselves, we treat others, and the other way around.

How do I treat myself when it comes to take my experience seriously? I don’t have to look any further than how I treat those around me.

There are many forms of inquiry, and even many ways to inquiry into “who/what am I?”.

One that I find especially useful right now is (a) identifying something that appears as “I”, and (b) ask “am I in it, or is it in me?”. Invariably, when I stay with it, I find the latter to be more accurate in terms of my immediate experience.

There are sensations, feelings, emotions, thoughts, sense of “I” as a center somewhere in/around the upper body, sense of a perceptual center and an awareness center, sense of “I” as the seer, and so on. And all of these happens within what is, within this immense space and expanse.

Sincerity

One aspect I need to work more with is sincerity. I tend to brings something into attention, stay with it for a while, and expect to find it within what is - as happening within space, and I - not surprisingly - do find it that way. But this is not a sincere and open-ended inquiry, and it is just such a sincere inquiry that is needed.

When I “trick” myself into realization, it only works some of the way. A part of what is knows it is not from a sincere exploration, and is not convinced. It is similar to an adult habitually responding to a child’s artistic expressions with “that is wonderful!”, and the child is not tricked. Something is missing.