I went on a retreat a week or so back. It was the ‘Seks en ruimte’ retreat by Centrum voor Tantra and it was very, very good. I won’t detail everything that we did there or much at all, really. But I do want to share a finding. And that finding was that we can move our ego boundary around. Here’s how…
First, and I wrote about this before, we can change our perception of our bodies from a solid, delineated object to a field. Once you experience your body as this buzzing, electric, tingly field, you can move the boundary of it around. Out into someone else’s body for example, or in. You can let your sense of self drop back from the perimeter of your body into the dimensionless space of awareness itself, of consciousness. You can shrink what you think of as inside.
And you can shrink it to zero. Awareness is as far as you can go, but once you’re resting there, inside has disappeared. And everything that remains is contained in what used to be outside. But what’s outside without inside? And what does outside really mean when what you’re resting in (awareness) contains everything that you used to label as outside?
You can do the opposite move too. Let’s say you’re lying down, eyes open or closed, and you relax. You relax into that field we talked about earlier. And you relax into experience. You soften your eyes, your hearing, your felt sense, your sense of self. And you let it drift. Out. You stop labeling and you just let it all drift into awareness. You can find that your sense of self starts to drift outward. Further and further, gently and softly, until everything that was outside is suddenly included in inside. same thing as before… what do outside and inside mean anymore when there’s just one left?
Then there’s another move, it’s sort of orthogonal to the one I described above. If you look at what you accept and what you reject, in yourself. Let’s take the body as an example, we all like certain bits and accept them and we dislike other bits and we reject those 👍🏻/👎🏻 With those two postures we create a boundary. Another sort of inside / outside divide. What if we were to relax that boundary? Just accept everything indiscriminately. No more boundary. Now do the same for other aspects of yourself. For all aspects of yourself.
What would happen if we did the same thing for everything on the outside as well. No more 👍🏻/👎🏻. It’s all in, it’s all accepted. Whatever is, is accepted. Indiscriminately. No more boundary.
There is one more move to make, and I have described it many times already on this blog. Relax the boundary between concepts. It’s all just experience if you let it in without conceptualizing it into things. A big buzzing field of experience in awareness. Pattern in consciousness. All just arising.
No inside or outside. No good or bad. No this or that. Everything is accepted and everything is included and nothing is labeled. Nothing is rejected and nothing is not self. What are we left with?
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Awareness and its content without boundaries. You can ‘unthink’ your way there, by not conceptualizing. You can feel your way there, by not dividing into me and other. And you can ‘unjudge’ your way there, by accepting everything.
And then, I suspect you can make your home there by reconditioning your habits to create those boundaries constantly. Repetition probably will have something to do with it.
We found the following boundaries: felt – me / other, thought – this / that, judged – good / bad… any more? Drop them in the comments (if anyone ever reads this).
Hah, comments are disabled. I thought of one: time – now / then.
And space – here / there.