I am experimenting with a different way of blogging, at the moment. I recorded myself today in a free-flowing manner to begin (we will see) a series of entries about the work I have developed (what I call Mindful Reality) and my relationship to it. I warn you that although it makes the basic points, it runs on, as I am giving myself permission to edit only mildly and leave the rest exactly as I spoke it into the recorder. I am going for a more personal feel than my prior posts. Here goes:
Entry One: The Work 9/20/2016
I do this work because it is a personal therapy and it makes me feel better. It’s a self-inquiry practice that is basically a reality check to put against the mind that is constantly feeding us information that is not based in reality and so I very much rely on this process which I have developed over the last eight to ten years and written two and a half books on. I use it regularly throughout the day; I journal incessantly in the work which I suspect in some way is a form of writing improvisation that leads to or assists in the practice of me writing the actual books. It’s so basic, the work, but has extended into other fields of philosophy and science because there are issues that come up, especially that were raised in my first book, that made me realize I was in a genre of debate over free will and how to explain or talk about consciousness in humans. But the practice really just comes down to the most basic form which is that I have to be wherever my body is in any moment and every single question that comes up in my mind about any situation in my life basically can be answered by the simplicity of that answer which is that I have to be sitting here right now, for example, making this recording, whether it makes any mental sense to me or not, because this is where my body is and this is the activity it is involved in. I state repeatedly in my books that an activity is an action. Basically we only act in real time with our body; this is what makes up our doings that we refer to and I can only be where this body is…where my body is is the same as my action. So the placement of my body on the surface it’s on (and we are always on a surface if we are alive because of gravity), this place that I’m at, this activity of sitting or standing or lying down on a surface somewhere is my action. So my whereabouts is synonymous with my action and basically my existence, the fact that I’m physically alive (or even if I were dead but we’re talking about being alive) means I’m in some action. I cannot be alive without being in some action; I cannot exist.
So it’s so simple because there is nothing more to anything that I will ever do than the fact that I’m alive because if I’m alive I am somewhere and that relationship of my body to my immediate environment, the couch, is my action. If I wanted to expand further I could just include the other objects or entities, organic or inorganic, that I’m in contact or interacting with. Right now I have a tape recorder in my hand and I am talking into the recorder, so I am sitting on a couch and talking into the recorder and that sums up my existence, my whereabouts, and my action, and it’s all the same thing and I can’t not be doing that, if I am, even if my mind thinks I should be doing something else right now; and I can’t be doing something else right now so that means that every single feeling that I’ve ever had or thought in any moment that I should be doing such and such to either prepare for something in the future or just that I should be doing that thing right now, every single one of those thoughts was and will always be incorrect and that is what the work is about. It is knowing that my thoughts, if they differ to any degree with what I’m currently doing, are incorrect and that means this body/person (me) is correct in what it is doing at all times. Though we sometimes do things that range from mildly horrific to absolutely horrific, it is unfathomable to us and the rest of society that our actions could be correct and more correct than what our thoughts think we should be doing but that is the truth and that is what my work is about.
Jill Eng 