At the risk of giving unwanted advice, I just wanted to add for the record that keeping these conceptual questions in mind, while looking for an experiential answer to it, rather than a thought-out one, can really work also!
I remembered when I visited Richard & Vineeto and I was just struck by a logical impossibility. They were telling me that time does not move, that time is still, and that space is still also. And I thought, how could anything possibly happen if time doesn’t move? It didn’t make sense to me. You needed time to pass for things to happen, didn’t you?
But then I was clearly experiencing things happening. Both couldn’t be true (that things happening, and that time stood still). But Richard & Vineeto were telling me it is! How to resolve the conundrum, the conceptual impossibility?
I was able to look for an experiential answer instead and the result was quite potent. I wrote about it in my report in a few spots:
RESPONDENT No. 1: Claudiu, besides enjoyment, what can i do to notice this pure intent, and then allow it to operate more and more, when not already with actually free people? i.e., how to notice it while i’m alone or with feeling beings? i know you have talked about pure intent before; i’m specifically interested in grasping it fully, as it looks like the energy of pure intent can prevent one from going around in circles for years… [and by that i mean, seeing magnets, not believing in them (#11821 ). i’m not looking for conceptual/ intellectual grasp. it needs to be as obvious as the color of the leaves outside my apartment window.]
CLAUDIU: […] As to how to go about experiencing it… you’ve got to consider the notion that it’s even possible for it to exist. Can it really be that life is inherently enjoyable if only ‘I’ were not here to mess it up? Ask the question but not to get a thought-out answer as a result, but rather, look for an experiential answer – as in, something in your experience that would answer the question. Look for a ‘positive’ answer, meaning, something beneficial/positive that is actually happening, vs. something that is not/something negative that is not the answer (e.g. don’t look for the ‘yes, I can see ‘I’ am rotten’ answer.)
In a similar vein, one that really gets to the nub of the issue is to ask, is anything actually happening at all? Is it possible for anything to be happening right now? Again, look for an experiential answer. How do you know something is happening?
Just do that, and see what becomes of your experience, and see if you can’t find something in it that doesn’t match up with the qualities of pure intent I’ve described and that have been described on the AFT site.
CLAUDIU: Reflective contemplation is indeed becoming more and more fascinating! There are bouts of what I have decided to call ‘odd contemplation’ wherein I ponder certain things and it’s as if the asking itself is leading to something which I do not know, yet, and which ‘I’ shy away from, instinctively… yet there is something about it. The same sort of feeling which I felt in Australia when I was wondering, ‘it seems impossible that anything can actually happen. Is anything actually happening?’ And which, in Richard’s houseboat, I pursued to the brink of the PCE – but not quite there.
CLAUDIU: I think what happened (this is an after-the-fact reconstruction) is that, being able to relax led to me being able to be curious. I had gotten a strange impression a few times during my trip which I didn’t pursue, but chose to pursue now. It was something along the lines of it seeming impossible for anything to be happening. I brought this up with Richard & Vineeto for the first time that evening and they asked me to elaborate.
So I attempted to put into words what I had experienced earlier. The only way I could possibly do that is by experiencing that sensation again, so I tapped into it again and then began trying to put it into words. Interestingly I couldn’t really say much about it, descriptively, except that it led to the question of ‘is anything actually happening right now?’ I decided to pursue the question, and I didn’t even consider trying to intellectually answer it. That would be missing the point. Instead it led to a deep existential probing. I became intensely curious to see the world Richard & Vineeto were actually living in.
What happened was amazing. What started coming through was an immense purity, more than I had ever experienced before. Everything looked so much finer than normal. It’s funny, I’m having trouble coming up with anything to say about it cause it seems it would be missing the point. Basically it’s like an entirely different world was shining through and that I was getting closer and closer to it. The world of Vineeto & Richard & Richard’s table & houseboat & coffee etc. A world of purity and sweetness. All precipitated by a deep curiosity as to whether anything was actually happening. Such a simple question!
I share this with the intent that Andrew or someone else can read it and see that it’s something they can do, too, and that it might work for them also (as it did for me), to find their way to experiencing pure intent.
Cheers,
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