Intro
John Astin introduces his series of short "experiential inquiries."
Contemplation
Let all prior knowledge and understanding fade into the background.
Preview
Relax any effort and "feel into the texture" of your experience.
Discover the limits of language as you explore the sensations in your face.
Look into your direct experience and notice how everything is always changing.
Try to find a dividing line between your skin and the rest of the world.
See how everything appears and vanishes in an instant.
Discover how experience "cannot be collapsed into any description or category."
Notice how this moment is inescapably present, no matter what happens.
Let go of any attempt to control attention and allow the mind to be as it is.
Feel how experience "shapeshifts" and never holds still.
Shift your focus from the "content" of experiencing to the greater "context."
Notice that presence is happening, all by itself.
Drop all labeling of experience and notice how everything is equal.
Feel the "swirl of sensations" of your body and see how there are no boundaries.
See if you can find a place where "you" end and "the world" begins.
Feel "the energy of life itself" and make no effort to alter or control it.
Encounter the world anew, as if you've never been here before.
Notice how "time" is an abstraction—a product of memory and thought.
See how "the more carefully we examine things, the less coherent they become."
Look and feel what is presently happening—and contemplate what you are.
“All that's here, now, is the potency, radiance, and wholeness we've been looking for.”
To experience reality is to embrace it—fully, unconditionally, and inseparably.
Our concepts obscure the infinitely rich complexity of all they seem to point to.
Each moment vanishes the instant it appears, liberating us to embrace the next one.
The problem at hand has already become entirely new—neither a problem, nor at hand.
Experience is always shifting, but the flow of change is constant, and contains all.
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Artwork by James Daus