CLOSED EYES EXPERIMENT
From the ‘Headless Way’ website - http://www.headless.org/experiments/closed-eyes.htm
Commentary by Richard Lang
Explore what it is to be First Person singular, present tense, with eyes closed. Practically speaking, probably the best way to do this would be to read a question, then close your eyes and investigate your experience. Then open your eyes, read another question, and so on… Or, you can get someone to read you the questions or record the questions yourself and play it back while doing the experiment.
With EYES CLOSED … consider the following:
Going by your own, present experience, not by memory, hearsay or imagination, how big are you?
What shape are you?
Could you be any size or shape?
Do you have boundaries?
Is there a place where you stop and the world begins? Or is there nothing dividing you from the world?
You can probably hear a range of sounds, from distant to near ones. Do you hear any sound right where you are? Don't sounds come and go in silence where you are?
You experience sensations such as warmth, discomfort, pleasure, breathing and so on. Do these make you into 'something' at centre, solid and limited – a thing separate from the world around you? Is there anything solid and unchanging at your centre? Or do these sensations come and go in aware no-thingness?
Isn’t this aware no-thingness like a TV screen in the sense that events happen on the screen but leave the screen itself unaffected and undefined? Don’t sounds and sensations come and go but leave awareness unmarked?
Whatever has happened in your past, are you not now empty and clear - capacity for whatever is happening now? The past does not solidify you at centre.
How big is a sensation? Does it define or limit you?
Attend to your right foot. Think of what it looks like. Isn’t the image a memory, since you cannot see your foot at the moment?
But what about the actual sensation of your foot, your experience of it in this present moment, putting aside memory? What colour is that sensation, what shape, what size?
How far away is it? (From where?)
Where exactly are its boundaries – does it have a clear edge?
Is this sensation where your being stops? Are you limited to it, somehow imprisoned inside it?
Isn’t that sensation happening in boundless awareness?
Are you not this awareness, this edgeless being, in which this rather-hard-to-describe, hard-to-pin-down changing sensation is happening?
Just as when you have your eyes open it is face there to space here, isn’t it now, with eyes closed, sensation there to space here? Your being has no boundaries. You are the edgeless space in which body sensations happen.
Pay attention to mental activity – to your thoughts and feelings.
Where are they?
Are they inside something? Or are they inside awareness?
Are they central to you, or are they peripheral?
Do they leave any trace when they have gone? Don’t they come and go on the screen of awareness, just as sounds and sensations come and go, leaving no trace?
We identify with our minds, believing we are our thoughts and feelings. Is your mind contained within anything? Are you contained within anything?
Think of the name of a city.
Did you know what that name was going to be before you thought it? Where did it come from? Where did it happen? Where did it go?
Think of a planet. A friend. A country. Are these thoughts happening inside any kind of container, or are they happening in the boundless space of awareness?
I find no origin, no container, no destination. For me they emerge out of nowhere – out of my undefinable being – without preview, without effort, and they dissolve back into this ‘nothingness’, leaving no mark on this ‘nothingness’.
Imagine the colour blue. Now the colour orange. Now the shape of a triangle. How do you do that?
I have no idea how I do it. These things appear as if by magic.
How creative this no-thingness is, this no-mind as some Zen Buddhists call it. Without effort thoughts and images emerge from nowhere, without preview, without my knowing how I do it.
Be aware of what you are feeling.
Remember how you were feeling earlier in the day. Or yesterday. The flow of feeling is changing all the time.
Are your feelings central to you? Do your feelings leave any marks on awareness? Do difficult experiences traumatise space?
Not in my experience. Where are my feelings? I find no container here. My mind is at large in the universe.