Playing Catch

Today I’m playing catch with my daughter. (With a large soft Dora the Explorer ball.) She is two years old. She loves it. She says, “Catch again Daddy! Catch again!” I suppose she likes the motion.

This got me thinking about experiences. All experiences are in motion. They are vibrations – on and off; Neurons firing – on/off; Light waves, sound waves – on/off.

Playing catch is a slow vibration. Throw – catch – throw – catch.

There are perhaps an endless number of such pairs:

Birth/Death, Sleeping/Waking, Breathing: In/out.

I’ve noticed that I get into trouble when I interfere with any particular vibration – when I try to make-permanent only one half of a vibrating pair.

Try only breathing in. Trouble! (Okay that was an extreme example.)

The experience of being a self is a kind of vibration. It is really the experience of self and not-self. It is like breathing. You can’t just breathe in. Likewise, you can’t just feel like a self. The feeling of being a self is dependent upon a corresponding experience of not-self.

For example, the computer before you is definitely not you (relatively speaking). Maybe you look at it (and feel not-self) and a split second later get a sense (perhaps a gentle tension around your eyes) that it is you that is reading. You can’t have one experience (self) without the other (not-self). Together they form a vibrating pair.

So we could say that there is a small experience of self which is one pole of the self/not-self vibration.

And we could say that there is a larger experience of Self – which includes both vibrating poles: self and not-self.

We don’t want to stop the sense of small-self from arising any more than we want to stop breathing in. But rather, we want to notice that the experiences that are masquerading as the small-self, are arising in the context of a greater self/not-self experience.

You are this greater “self/not-self experience.”

When you notice this something rather interesting happens.

Okay time to play again . . .

Tallis