Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Fresh Opportunities Many Times per Second

     Buddhist teachings from 500BCE state that the universe is born, lives and dies every 60th of a second. So we're ALWAYS free to choose a wiser, kinder, more wholesome, way of life! See: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2016/07/727-which-mode-to-choose.html
     Amazingly, an LCD monitor’s frame rate (speed at which a video source can feed an entire frame of new data to a display) is often locked at 60 frames per second. (wiki)
 

     Someone once told Rupert Spira, "There’s a tendency to identify my quality of being by the thoughts that arise."
     Rupert Spira's response, using his favorite TV screen analogy:
     "No. Identify the quality of being just by the quality of being. The screen doesn’t derive its qualities from the image. Your relationship to thoughts and perceptions is the same as the relationship between the screen and an image. In other words, the screen is intimately one with the image. It’s closer than close (clasps hands together, fingers interlocking) to the image, but at the same time, it is completely independent of it. That is you. You – this experience of being aware – are totally intimate with all your experience. Every experience you have - that is every so called inside feeling (points to his own chest), but also so called outside perception (points away from himself) - are this close (clasps hands) to you, totally intimate, not even intimate because there are not two things there to begin with. There isn’t a screen and an image. It’s just you, just knowing. So in that sense, you are intimate with all experience, equally intimate. Not more intimate with this (touching to his own body), than you are with this (touching a glass of water) – equally intimate with all experience, and at the same time, you, the experiencer, simply being aware, are absolutely independent of all experience. So it’s this mixture of total intimacy (clasps hands) and total freedom (opens hands). 
     As we understand ourselves, so we see the world. So if we think (hands on his chest) ‘I am a finite, temporary self that shares the limits of the body’, if we think ‘I am a finite, temporary object’, then our experience will appear (one hand on his chest, other hand pointing outwards) in conformity with that belief. In other words, your experience will be a multiplicity and diversity of finite objects. You will feel that you are separate from everyone and everything, related to them through an act of knowing, feeling or perceiving. I know such and such, I love you, I see the tree. These are the three channels – knowing, feeling and perceiving – through which the inside self, the apparent subject, is connected to the outside object, other, or world. That’s if you believe that you are a temporary, finite subject, made of a mind, living in a body. But if you know that you are simply this unqualified, experience of being aware, then you find yourself equally pervading all experience. You cannot say ‘I am closer to my thoughts than I am to the sound of that car.’ Thoughts are made out of thinking. The sound of the car is made out of hearing. Both appear equally in me. And when I try to touch the stuff that they are made of, all I find is this empty knowing."

       Rupert Spira: Liberating Our Thoughts From the Tyranny of the Illusory Self




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