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You ask about the origins of empty-mindedness.  One was my experience of long, drawn-out arguments with shouting, crying, begging, with-holding, accusing, sulking, withdrawing, and attacking.  Words and acts from the past would be dragged in to make a case.  Threats and demands would be made to gain the advantage.  Finally, through exhaustion, we would reach a position where each of us would abandon the attack and just express our needs.  It felt like a summer squall had blown in and passed over, leaving flooded paths, downed branches and litter all over.  At that point we were able to hear the other person and accept their needs as real.

After a long time, I saw that the argument was merely the precursor to this place of communication and potential resolution.  I never liked arguments, and these days, I choose to go directly to that post-squall place of self-expression without attack, where I can clearly distinguish between what I want to happen and what other people should do.

A second contribution to empty-mindedness has been a decade or more of sitting.  I won’t give instruction here, but through repeated practice, the ability to separate thoughts and actions, still the mind, be present and distinguish between thoughts and direct experience makes access to a center point of stillness easier and easier.

Lastly, I have done a number of Enlightenment Intensives, 3-day events which excel in removing the fog of language and revealing the truth underneath.

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My Dear Kat,

I want to speak about balance.  The way we act together is very puzzling.  We come to agreement on what we do together without apparent effort or decision-making.  Certainly there are times when only one of us feels tired, talkative, sleepy, sexual, but mostly we concur on whether to walk, what movie to watch, when to separate, and all those other joint decisions.  It’s that process of deciding that is obscure; there is no sense of pitting my needs against yours, struggling until a winner emerges.  There is scarcely ever even a sense that we have different agendas at all.  But how can this be?  We’re different people with different clocks; the odds of being in sync become more improbable the more it happens.

It is as if we have moved our consciousness from our individual selves to us, that incorporeal being that has both our interests at heart.  I don’t invoke magical channels here; it’s likely that there are signals of body language, smell, voice, etc. by which we adjust to each other.  But such communication is not conscious, hence the puzzlement above, and more to the point, is irrelevant because the focus is on what we do, our intentionality, and here, my best reply is “nothing”.  We achieve this by being, not by doing, and the more still we are, the more intense the experience becomes.

Kit

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