Good luck with the fasting, and feel free to drop in and let us know how it goes for you.

Good luck with the fasting. I am not sure how long you will go on with it, but if you plan on an extended fast, you’ll probably find things smoothing out around day 7 or so. Just be smart about it, whatever you decide to do.

And thank you for your wonderful comment. After reading it I have only one question for you:

Are you somehow separate from your brain?

I have not gone back to reading spiritual works. But I can see a time when I might do so. Not to learn how to live, or learn what to do, but to see how one might express this untouchable thing. But to be honest, at this time, I am just not interested. Not yet. (Maybe not ever? Who knows?)

I find it more useful to look at what I am experiencing now rather than what concepts someone has of another state.

That is it, right there. It is nice to hear these things from teachers or gurus. But really, it has no meaning. Not that it is a waste of time. But what can one do? Just smile and say, “That is nice.”

Perhaps it is just this perspective (non-perspective). A person might sit in front of me and recite my own writing, unbeknownst to me, and it still would not mean anything.

Of course, that is not to say words might not move another person in a special way. None of this is to deny that which might move another person into their own investigation. But one must be careful not to cultivate a reliance on the words, no matter how lovely or penetrating.

I don’t remember much of anything in the years between 2001 to 2006, although there was no ‘explosion’ as such. (But I remember our wedding, dear! Really I do!)

I remember not liking certain jobs. Feeling pain and hate, vaguely. Feelings of wanting sex and so on. But sitting here now, I cannot be sure of any of it. It is all like a vague dream. Even the memories of yesterday are quick victims of this ‘wasting disease.’

Certainly, one is not preferable to another. It is silly to want to escape a dream.

You just go on. You live your life.

One feels sympathy for those effort-ing on a fool’s errand. And all we can do is talk. But these words we use may have some eventual impact on others, as certain words may have impacted us.

Perhaps it is not such a fool’s errand in the end. After all, one must live their lives in some way.

I find it more useful to look at what I am experiencing now rather than what concepts someone has of another state. A global perspective is useful but the real work is in gong into your experience, not someone else’s concepts. You are, after all, the experiencer. Everything else arises from that. The source may be experienced as nothingness. But it may also be experienced as fullness. Both are valid. It depends simply on how you come to it. What’s the point of making everything nothing if that’s not the experience?

And even though I say experience, waking is not a shift in experience but rather a shift in being. But being arises from awareness, so attention is the key, not the content of, those concepts. This is why teachers speak of looking at what is looking. What is looking is what awakens. This is why it might be described as an “accident”. It happens from Self rather than the me. As one fellow put it, it is not Bob waking to Self but Self waking to Bob. What can Bob do about that?

Thanks for sharing more of your process, Takuin. There was steps after all. (laughs) But they are steps into less rather than more, if we are speaking of the me. The me of you

And yet, to forcibly release the cherishing of beliefs or seeking is not quite it.

Spirituality is not my way but I can see how it provides a framework for many.

All this seeking and spiritualizing and practicing and accumulating is effort. Perhaps effort is necessary to see that it is not.

I like the message. It was funny, too.