Welcome to a mini cast of In the Deep.
I'm your host,
Katherine Ingram,
And the following short selection is the opening talk from one of my sessions of Dharma dialogues called Direct Your Attention.
It was recorded in Byron Bay,
Australia in 2012.
Whatever you may have going on in your flurries of thoughts,
Whatever dramas you're playing out in imagination,
Whatever worries,
Or future tripping,
Or regret,
Or any story whatsoever,
Whatever it is,
It is possible to direct your attention into presence,
Into ease of being.
And this is not just a mental exercise,
It's a felt sense.
So right now,
The truth of your reality is that you are here sitting on a chair,
Most of you.
There's one person standing right now.
You're sitting on a chair in a very pleasant atmosphere.
You're in a human animal with all of these senses that come with that very complex animal.
And you're having a direct experience of being.
It's quite simple.
Now,
There may be a lot of story going on in your thoughts.
But in reality,
Right now,
There's just this direct sense,
This direct felt sense,
Experienced sense of being,
An aliveness that you can feel.
And I propose you can start to get used to sitting in that feeling,
That felt sense,
Not thinking I have to be here now,
But noticing you are,
Feeling it.
This doesn't negate the fact that sometimes we have problems that we do have to consider,
Situations,
Gnarly little dilemmas.
Certainly,
Our attention can be used in those moments for considering these matters.
But then as soon as that's no longer necessary,
The default position becomes that of stillness,
Ease,
An inner sense of aliveness.
If you just let your mind go along willy-nilly on its conditioned track,
It will,
For most of us,
Take us down some very,
Into some bad neighborhoods.
So we direct the attention.
You have that facility.
Almost everyone has that facility,
Happily.
Some people,
Unfortunately,
Due to mental illness or distress,
Are not able to direct their attention.
But I suspect that everyone here in this room is,
And we might as well use this fantastic tool that makes the difference between being in a state of madness or in a state of peace.
You might as well use this one facility that you have in moving around your attention.
You see,
We're highly conditioned.
We're conditioned,
We're influenced and conditioned by,
First of all,
Genetics.
Our parents.
Just the genes you inherited.
That's a whole stream of a couple hundred thousand years of human,
Homo sapiens sapiens,
Genetic encoding.
And you're also conditioned by your parents' behavior.
They were conditioned,
Of course,
By many factors as well.
You're conditioned by your culture,
By the time of your birth,
By the time that you live in,
By your education,
By your peers,
By your siblings.
We have tremendous conditioning.
And we have all kinds of things that just go on automatic.
A biological program that just goes automatically.
The reptilian brain working on its own autonomic system.
We have lots of conditioning.
But we do have this one ability through our neocortex,
Our newest brain,
Newest part of our brain,
We have this one ability to move our attention around.
So when you're in the midst of a fight or flight,
For instance,
And all that happened was somebody tried to cut you off on the freeway,
You can feel the rush of the adrenaline,
But you redirect the attention.
Even though the rush is still there,
There's a little flutter,
A little wave of nervousness,
Of anxiety that went through.
You redirect the attention.
What's real?
What's true here?
Feeling the aliveness,
Feeling the sense of presence,
Feeling the well-being.
And like this,
It becomes your natural organic habit.
You start to sense this as your truest sense of yourself rather than being in a kind of dreamy,
Kind of woozy fantasy or nightmare.
You get much more used to sensing yourself in this aliveness.
One of my favorite quotes from Nisargadatta is,
It is reality which makes this present seem so vital,
So different from past and future,
Which are merely mental.
It is reality which gives this sense of presence,
This present moment,
Its aliveness,
Because it's real,
So different from past and future,
Which are just mental imagination.
You can feel it in the room,
A kind of quality of brightness,
Of aliveness.
As you start to feel this,
As you start to sense this more as your actual felt sense of yourself,
Then when you're off in the dreamy,
Woozy,
Depressed,
Worried,
Drama,
It no longer feels normal.
It feels abnormal.
And you know something's off,
Something's not quite right.
And you feel a kind of haunting in this knowing that something's not quite right.
You feel a haunting,
A home calling.
You want to be back on your,
What I like to call your mountain seat of freedom.
You want to be back sitting in your ease of being.
And this habit starts to become stronger in this simple way because you start to feel it's unpleasant to be off dreaming and nightmaring and missing this lovely,
Precious life.
Quite a shame really to think about dreaming your life away.
And many people do.
Many people don't really notice till the very end.
But this,
Yes,
But this is an acquired taste.
It doesn't take much acquiring to enjoy because once you get used to this even a little bit,
You want to return.
This has been In The Deep.
You can find the entire list of In The Deep podcasts at katherineingram.
Com where you can also book a private session by phone or Skype or make either a one time or recurring tax deductible donation.
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Till next time.
