Up and feeling ready for it. I like Mondays. New starts. Feeling fresh. Ready to make a mark. Deliberate and intentional is what’s on my mind. 20 minutes eyes open meditation. Guided by Sam Harris on Waking Up. Sam talks a lot about non-duality. Not explicitly in the guided meditation but it was the theme. Look for what’s looking. Is it separate from or on the edge of experience and looking in? I remember listening to a lecture by Alan Watts, “Man and Nature” from 1965.
Alan described a false distinction between humans and nature…
“We have been brought up to experience ourselves as isolated centers of awareness and action, placed in a world that is not us, that is foreign, alien, other, which we confront. Whereas, in fact, the way an ecologist describes human behavior is as an action: what you do is what the whole universe is doing at the place you call here and now. You are something the whole universe is doing in the same way that a wave is something that the whole ocean is doing.”
Alan went on to name this sense of separation as a hallucination comparing it to someone who thinks they’re Napoleon or believes they’re a poached egg looking for toast to sit on. Alan asserted…
“Our real body is not just what’s inside the skin, but our whole total external environment.”
the deeper realisation being…
“Underneath the superficial self, which pays attention to this and that, there is another self; more really us than I. And if you become aware of that unknown self, the more you become aware of it, the more you realize that it is inseparably connected with everything else that there is.”
and later highlighting the real environmental consequences that are becoming more and more evident…
“Because if we don’t experience ourselves that way, we mistreat our environment. We treat it as an enemy. We try to beat it into submission. And if we do that comes disaster.”
We can look but is there really anything there to find?
I have a bit of lateral movement in my front wheel. I think the bearings in my dynamo hub may need looking at. This is job that must be completed by an authorised service centre. It’s still within warranty. Fingers crossed I’ll be able to sort something out. Just hoping that does not involve removing the hub from the wheel. Got a feeling it might. Double fingers crossed.
Purchased digital downloads of some Misty In Roots albums. Earth, Roots Controller, Wise and Foolish, Musi-O-Tnuya and The John Peel Sessions. Off to see them play on the 30th October at the Concorde 2 in Brighton.
Intermittent fasting. 16:8 method. Last ate at 9.00 pm last night. Took a while to get focused on what I should really be doing this morning. Could be down to low sugar levels and feeling hungry. Tested that idea out using the Pomodoro technique. Turned out I was perfectly capable of focusing. I just needed to start.
Stopped at 1.00 pm for lunch. Very nice. Checked my RSS feeds. Oh good. A new post by prickly oxheart. And what do you know. Begin again. And again. Very timely.
Despite a long period of consultation and work being signed off it was decided during a meeting this afternoon that significant changes should be made to a project I’ve been leading on. Those pushing for the changes had not contributed to the development process or it appeared had read and understood the supporting documents. The saying that a camel is a horse designed by a committee never seemed so true. It was an opportunity to practice self talk and time travel to manage my emotions. I was not wholly successful in doing so.
No ride today. Had some dinner and spent the evening listening to Misty in Roots while devising a staging system in NewsBlur for blog/news feeds.