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I can’t remember if the “wonderful accident” is the correct phrase, but I recall Bruce talking about the Taoist and how they were clever monkeys. They sort of suckered people by giving them what they think they needed while setting them up to find what they really need. I think he called this the wonderful accident. I apologize if I’ve got the phrase wrong. Hopefully you get the gist. Anyway, I was wondering if anyone knows what this accident refers to.
I think about crap like this far too often and have a couple of ideas: 1) it could refer to the peak experiences we get from time to time. 2) It could refer to glimpses of enlightenment (whatever that is). 3) It might refer to something a little more insidious that you might not even realize is happening. This is what I want to talk about.
It occurred to me that after 20 years of doing silly hand waving exercises that something really wonderful had happened. Something truly insidious; I’ve started to connect with everything. That might not sound too important but it really is the most important result of all of my training. All of the health benefits are actually second prize.
From the moment we are born, we are conditioned to think we are separate. Our culture teaches us that seeing is believing. We look with our eyes and identify with our bodies and think that they are separate from everything else. We think we end at the boundary of our skin. Worse, we think we are our stuff, our stories, our thoughts and ideas. But we’re not.
The problem starts with only using your eyes and external senses.
At the most rudimentary level, the Taoist practices start with getting you to feel. Why? Because they want you to re-align your thinking and more importantly your feeling experience of self. Once you start feeling chi, your boundaries are challenged. You can’t help but wonder where do I start and end? The boundary I created seems arbitrary at best. You may not even have had the thought or questioned these things, but that’s what is so insidious. They’ve taught you to re-align your experience without ever telling you to do it. After-all, they don’t want you to have the thought, they want you to have the experience. This is very clever.
I would argue that this conditioned separateness is why everyone is so alienated, why everyone feels so alone. They are dis-connected.
I don’t know squat about ancient cultures but it seems to me that the native Americans, the aborigines, the Taoists…all taught their children that they were connected to the world in profound ways: through spirit and energy. Just hearing that would change the way you think and perceive yourself. Contrast this to a mechanistic, scientific view I grew up in. It emphasizes self reliance, capitalism, possessions, and winning above all else. Can we possibly be more dis-connected?
Ranting aside, this all gets back to our practice and one of the key goals we have — discovering what we are, our essence.
If you realize you are not your car, your house, your job, your story, your thoughts, your emotions; then what is left? For me, I just experience consciousness. It isn’t some profound religious experience. I’m just conscious. I think too much. Before I had this revelation, I couldn’t stop thinking. Afterward, I found that I can think or not think. I found the switch to turn it on or off while staying conscious. I can’t teach you how do to this. I’m not exactly sure how I do it. I do like the quiet of not thinking obsessively, continuously, on and on and on….
Anyway, I think this will lead me to finally understand and “see” what I really am. It may take a very, very, very long time, but who cares? The good news is that I feel more connected than ever before and I think I’m removing more of the veil that keeps me from recognizing my essence.
Finally, I hope this helps put some of our practices in a new light that gives you more perspective on why we spend so much time trying to feel and work with our bodies as well as how that all fits into the bigger picture. Now I just have to obsessively figure out how this all fits into the seven palm change.
I’ve had a few of those peak experiences but the fact that they’re accidents makes it so hard to replicate. I think the trap is that if you focus on recreating the feeling then your focus is not where it should be. Does that sound about right? It’s like as if the manifestation of these things requires such precise control and intent that if you’re off by a tiny bit then it’s not going to work.
How would you approach these accidents? Just forget about them and keep going as per normal?
I think in terms of two types of peak experiences. One type occurs when you have a really good training session and something new appears. This happens a lot more often for me these days. These type of peak experiences used to be fewer and farther between.
The second type is the kind that is more like religious awakening. These are really rare but have a life changing quality.
So, the latter type can’t be replicated and you should never put any energy into trying to replicate them. That doesn’t mean you don’t continue to digest the implications and changes they produce.
The more mundane type that is part of training are another matter. I’ll hunt them down tenaciously. I’ll train and train and train until I find it again. The trick for me is to pay attention to my intuition and abandon a bad idea when you’ve gone down a rat hole. I’ll often discover something else along the way too. I guess this is how I discover some things that aren’t taught. Right or wrong they focus my training and help me enjoy the long hours of incessant training. This is also why I have become very clear about what I’m trying to do and exactly how I’m trying to do it.
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