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9 Ways of Looking – Perception Training for Peace and Bliss

What is it you are seeking?

When I was finally able to answer this question, it turned out to be three things; trust, intimacy, and wonder. The seeking didn’t so much end in an answer, but in a new relationship with life.

I have found that there are 9 ways of looking that can guide us to the peace and bliss that comes from a relationship with life that is based on trust, intimacy, and wonder.

It is important to always keep in mind that none of these ways of looking are really real, but they are just as real as our normal way of perceiving  (remember that all perceptions are empty). Eventually, these ways of perceiving blend into one (stillness) and become effortless.

I suggest to clients that they practice these ways of looking throughout the day. Some are harder than others, so at first, it is important to stick to the ones that come easiest (e.g. the first one isn’t really available to us until we develop a deep relationship with stillness). We can always come back to the harder ones later.

I am supported by stillness (trust). This way of looking becomes available once we are aware of the permanent stillness at the core of our being.I am choosing what is happening (trust). Seeing ourselves as life being endlessly creative and creating this current experience.I appreciate what is here (trust). Saying ‘yes’ to everything in our current experience.Appreciating physical sensations (intimacy). Appreciating the physical sensations in our body right now enlivens and increases the intensity of what we are experiencing.I am the entirety of what I am experiencing (intimacy). What I am experiencing is creating the sense of me.All is stillness (intimacy). Viewing life as the dance of stillness. I don’t know what I’m experiencing (wonder). Letting go of all ideas and labels about what it is we are experiencing. Looking at life as if we were a newborn baby seeing things for the first time.I don’t know what I am (wonder).I experience a sense of wonder about what is going to happen next (wonder).9 Ways of Looking – Perception Training for Peace and BlissFull of WonderThe View from StillnessWhat Does it Mean to Be Rejected?Waking Up to Being a Character in a DreamThe post 9 Ways of Looking – Perception Training for Peace and Bliss first appeared on Paul Garrigan Mindfulness Training.

Full of Wonder

Don’t judge your progress based on how convincing your beliefs feel to you.  Remember, a completely different set of beliefs could seem just as convincing to somebody else. Judge your progress based on the depth of peace you experience with life. Never reach a point where you believe you are beyond being totally deluded. Stay humble and full of wonder.

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The View from Stillness

Imagine staring out at a meadow on a warm summer day. Can you notice the peace and stillness in this image? But, if we were able to examine this scene more closely, if we got down into the dirt, we would see the game of life being played out with things living and dying and things being created and destroyed.

Do you notice that the perception of peace and stillness is not dependent on what happens down in the dirt? Our biggest mistake as humans is that we try to obtain the peace and stillness of the meadow by trying to control what happens in the dirt (this is what is meant by craving).

The View from StillnessWhat Does it Mean to Be Rejected?Waking Up to Being a Character in a DreamLife is Not a Mistake, Punishment, or InconvenienceLife is But a DreamThe post The View from Stillness first appeared on Paul Garrigan Mindfulness Training.

What Does it Mean to Be Rejected?

When I was 17 my first serious girlfriend broke up with me. I felt totally devasted. We hadn’t been together long, maybe six months, but it felt like my life being ripped apart when she suggested ‘we should just be friends’.

Over the next couple of weeks, I spent way too many hours in my darkened bedroom listening to the most depressing music I could find (thank you Billy Bragg). I also drove my friends (or anyone who would listen) mad with my obsessive yo-yo-ing between ‘my life is over’ and ‘I don’t care that we broke up’. It was the only thing I talked about for a long time.  Of course, the breakup also pushed my enthusiasm for alcohol up a few notches.

I wouldn’t have been able to put it into words back then, but I do remember at times having a sense that there was far more going on than just the breakup. I felt rejected, and this wasn’t something new to me. I could get over the fact that she didn’t want to be my girlfriend (when push came to shove, I didn’t really want to be with somebody who didn’t want to be with me), but I saw her rejection as further evidence that I was an unwelcome outsider in life.

There were moments when I could see my decent into depression and despair wasn’t really about her, but about the fact that my attempt to form a connection had been rebuffed. I had put myself in a vulnerable position, and it was like she had metaphorically kicked me in the balls.

There were many more experiences of rejection to come in my life before I finally figured out something monumental. I realized that there were times when I felt deeply connected to another human even though it later turned out this person hadn’t been as enthusiastic about the relationship as I had been. This meant that the sense of connection couldn’t be something they were doing, but something I was doing. I was looking for signs that it was safe for me to open a connection, and it didn’t matter if I misread the signs.

One of the biggest sources of suffering for us humans is the sense of being disconnected. We feel starved of intimacy, and we can spend the rest of our lives seeking it. One of our biggest fears is rejection because this only reinforces our sense of disconnection.

The Zen monk Dogen once described awakening as ‘intimacy with the ten thousand things’. This is poetic language for intimacy with everything. It turns out that our sense of disconnection is completely psychological. This means that when we feel rejected, it is illusionary and exists only in our minds.

We have learned to see people wanting to spend time with us, or people being nice to us, or people agreeing to have sex with us, as requirements for connection but there are no such requirements. Connection is something we recognize already exists, always has existed, and always will exist. What part of us is separate from life? Disconnection is not something we were born with, but something we were tricked into believing.

Nobody can forbid us from feeling connected to them. Disconnection only happens when we create a psychological barrier out of fear. Connection/intimacy is not something that can be given or taken away.

What Does it Mean to Be Rejected?Waking Up to Being a Character in a DreamLife is Not a Mistake, Punishment, or InconvenienceLife is But a DreamI Do Not KnowThe post What Does it Mean to Be Rejected? first appeared on Paul Garrigan Mindfulness Training.

Waking Up to Being a Character in a Dream

What can be done to help a character in a dream? Is the answer to make it a better dream for this character? Or is a better solution to wake up to being a character in a dream?

To be a character in a dream requires having a unique perspective. It is this that creates the sense of separation between the character and the rest of the dream landscape. All suffering in the dream arises due to this sense of separation.   Of course, no such division actually exists because the entire dream belongs to the dreamer.

Any attempt to improve the situation for the dream character actually requires reducing the sense of separation (e.g. giving the character more control over the dream landscape). This means expanding the sense of ‘I’ beyond the perspective of the limited character. The ultimate solution then is to wake up to being a character in a dream.

Now, we might well ask, why can’t the dream character just take control the dream? Answer, no such entity exists independently of the dream. Any sense of control belongs to the dream and not the dream character. In other words, the character only ever has an illusion of control.

Being a character in a dream is always going to involve limitation. There is no way around it. That’s what a dream character is (a dream that is being limited by a certain perspective). The suffering the dream character experiences is due to this limitation. Escape from suffering can only come from escaping the limitations of the dream character.

The dream character doesn’t wake up because it is this limited perspective that is the source of suffering.

Waking Up to Being a Character in a DreamLife is Not a Mistake, Punishment, or InconvenienceLife is But a DreamI Do Not KnowStop Looking for ReassuranceThe post Waking Up to Being a Character in a Dream first appeared on Paul Garrigan Mindfulness Training.

Life is Not a Mistake, Punishment, or Inconvenience

Are you looking forward to the paradise of the next life? Are you eagerly awaiting the mothership from outer-space that is going to whisk you off to the next level? Are you hoping to one day transcend this vale of tears through the power of meditation or psychedelic drugs?

What if we are mistaken? What if this is as good as it gets? What would happen if instead of treating life as a waiting room before we arrive at something better (even if our image of this ‘something better’ is nonexistence), we wake up to incredible gift of what is here right now?

The fact that we experience anything at all is miraculous. We all somehow appeared in a world full of people, animals, plants, technology, history, and stories. This world arouse in us like a dream, but because it was persistent, we were able to create a reasonably solid identity within in.

Stop for a second, look around, isn’t it incredible that all  of this exists? Isn’t it strange and wonderful? Go outside, and look up. If it is a nice day, you will see an enormous burning ball of gas that we call the sun in the sky above. How freaking crazy is that? Somehow all of this is here. Isn’t it marvelous?

What if instead of looking for something better than this life, we started to value it. What difference would that make to our life? If you believe in an afterlife, what makes you think you will appreciate it anymore than you do this one?

As the poet David Whyte writes in his poem ‘Everything is Waiting for You‘:

“Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the

conversation. The kettle is singing

even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots

have left their arrogant aloofness and

seen the good in you at last. All the birds

and creatures of the world are unutterably

themselves. Everything is waiting for you.”

Life is Not a Mistake, Punishment, or InconvenienceLife is But a DreamI Do Not KnowStop Looking for ReassuranceOur Thinking Mind Provides a Map – It is Not the TerritoryThe post Life is Not a Mistake, Punishment, or Inconvenience first appeared on Paul Garrigan Mindfulness Training.

Life is But a Dream

Row, row, row, your boat, gently down the stream…

One day the realization comes that life is but a dream.

We’ve never experienced a world out there. All we have experienced is an interpretation of a world that appears to be out there.

Every human being (and every other creature) is having their own unique experience of this moment. Who then is experiencing the ‘real world’? Nobody of course. There is no world beyond interpretation. It’s all empty. It’s the stuff of dreams. The dreamer creates the dream, and the dream creates the dreamer.

All teachers are characters in a dream, and all teachings are part of that same dream. None of it can be trusted fully. To wake up is to realize this. It is not about waking up from the dream (dream characters don’t get to wake up). Liberation comes from realizing it is a dream.

As the teacher Nisargadatta once said:

“The very idea of going beyond the dream is illusory. Why go anywhere? Just realize that you are dreaming a dream you call the world, and stop looking for ways out.”

Or to put in even more simply:

Row, row, row your boat,

Gently down the stream,

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,

Life is but a dream.

The post Life is But a Dream first appeared on Paul Garrigan Mindfulness Training.

I Do Not Know

Those beautiful words ‘I don’t know’ are what opens to door to wonder, This wonder is immensely superior to the fleeting I could also see how there was no shortage of certainty in the world, and yet these ‘true believers’ all believed in vastly different things.comfort of foolishly thinking that I understand what is going on. I realized that all teachings, theories, and beliefs are just feeble efforts of the fearful human mind to tame life, this is useful, but life won’t be tamed or contained by my limited imagination.

The ability to question everything and experience a sense of wonder is such an awesome part of the human experience. As Socrates said, “the unexamined life is not worth living“.  It is such a shame that we give up this wonder so easily. To believe that we have found the answers is to exchange wonder for false comfort. The only way to maintain this comfort is by constantly convincing ourselves (and anyone else who will listen) that what we believe is true. We only have to look at the state of the world to see how well that is going.

I discovered a long time ago that I just couldn’t trust my beliefs or opinions. I could see that my attraction to certain ways of looking at life had more to do with my personality and my conditioning than it did with any kind of Truth. How likely was it that out of all the possible personalities, I just happened to have the one that was delusion-proof?

Another thing that became obvious to me was that I couldn’t trust my sense of certainty. There were too many things that had appeared certain to me (undeniable even) at one point in my life only to later appear foolish. I could also see how there was no shortage of certainty in the world, and yet these ‘true believers’ all believed in vastly different things.

I needed to find something that wasn’t dependent on beliefs or my sense of certainty. Eventually I did. In those moments when I was able to let go of everything I thought  I knew, I discovered an incredible stillness – an unshakable trust, wonder, and intimacy with life. It turns out that this is what I’d been searching for all along. Such sweet liberation. This peace begins and ends with the words ‘I don’t know’.

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Stop Looking for Reassurance

We need to stop looking for reassurance that things are going to work out the way we want them to. It may initially make us feel better, but it ultimately just leads to discouragement and disillusionment. Reassurance is like throwing a stick for an overly energetic dog – our hairy friend will soon be back for more.

Lasting peace is to be found not in controlling the changing circumstances of our life, but in the knowledge we can be at peace with whatever is going on. It is not about what happens to us but about how we relate to what happens to us. This is the difference between living in paradise or living  in hell.

I remember years ago hearing a quote from the teacher Krishnamurti where he said something like, ‘I don’t care what happens to me’. At the time, his words pissed me off, I suspected he was either lying or terribly depressed. Now I have a much better understanding of his meaning.

Once we realize that peace comes from how we relate to life rather than the circumstances of our life, it doesn’t matter so much what is happening. Once we begin to experience life from the stillness at the core of our being, we realize that this stillness is dependent on nothing.  There is nothing we can do to increase it or decrease it. The peace of stillness is beyond anything we can imagine, and there is nothing we need to do to earn it or maintain it.

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Our Thinking Mind Provides a Map – It is Not the Territory

The thinking-mind is there to help us navigate life. It provides us with a map, but we get into trouble when we fail to recognize the limitations of this map. When this happens, we mistake the map for the territory, and we end up relying on the map in situations where it just isn’t appropriate.

It is vital for us to recognize that our internal maps that our thinking-mind relies upon have some serious issues. First off, it is not actually possible to capture the complexities of life in any map. It doesn’t matter how much we think about things and how careful we are when it comes to choosing our beliefs, our maps are always going to be of limited value. Another problem is that every human will have maps that are based on faulty data (e.g. things we believe about ourselves or other people that just aren’t true).

Another limitation with our maps is we can add data to them based on the ability of this information to reassure us rather than whether this information can hold up against what is actually happening. An example of this might be, ‘if I just  work hard enough, then I’ll be secure’. It is usually only a matter of time before such beliefs become challenged, and when this happens, we can easily fall into despair.

So, if we are able to recognize the limitations of the thinking-mind what then? I used to believe that thinking was the only game in town, and I guess this is true for most of us. There is a resource that is far superior to the thinking-mind that I call ‘stillness’, and it is building a relationship with this incredible resource that will provide us with the peace we are seeking. It is this that gives our life the direction it needs.

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