I cannot yet experience my thoughts as separate from my awareness. I identify too intimately with them. Yet I am not my thoughts. I am my awareness. I therefore go back and forth between being aware of my bodily sensations and being aware of my thought just now. What is the difference? What is the same? I experience my sensations as separate from me. They are objectified targets of my attention. I then leave those sensations and as they fade into unconsciousness my thought stands out. What am I thinking? What drives it? Don't judge it or correct it. Just be aware of it as it passes. Too vague? Go back to your sensations. Feel their clarity and otherness. Now go back to your thought. Is it clearer now? Let it pass thru you as a sensation. As a story you are silently telling yourself. Demonstrate to yourself more and more certainly the identity of yourself with your pure awareness, not the content of that awareness.
That sounds odd to me...since I can objectify my own thoughts at will.
I suspect it has something to do with being religious...where contemplating an ideal observer provides ample practice at assuming an objective perspective on one's self.
(Sep 3, 2017 06:29 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]I cannot yet experience my thoughts as separate from my awareness. I identify too intimately with them. Yet I am not my thoughts. I am my awareness. I therefore go back and forth between being aware of my bodily sensations and being aware of my thought just now. What is the difference? What is the same? I experience my sensations as separate from me. They are objectified targets of my attention. I then leave those sensations and as they fade into unconsciousness my thought stands out. What am I thinking? What drives it? Don't judge it or correct it. Just be aware of it as it passes. Too vague? Go back to your sensations. Feel their clarity and otherness. Now go back to your thought. Is it clearer now? Let it pass thru you as a sensation. As a story you are silently telling yourself. Demonstrate to yourself more and more certainly the identity of yourself with your pure awareness, not the content of that awareness.
Each of us begins as a capacity for vague, disorganized, non-interpreted experiences emerging from oblivion. That original version of "what one internally is" before the years of thought and behavior habit-patterns of specific individual development accumulate in memory... Would seem so common to everyone at that stage that it could be considered a generic identity that subsumes us all. Wherever and whenever it occurs again and again.
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