Notes from One Bottomless Moment

Notes from One Bottomless Moment - by Joan Tollifson.

Gathered notes

• The first-person subjective view and the third-person objective view co-exist in our human lives.
• Waking up is about not being stuck in either one.
  • We often overlook the first-person subjective view.
• Spiritual awakening points to the first-person subjective view.
  • All-inclusive, unconditional love, accepting everything.
• The third-person subjective view doesn’t go away. It appears on and off. Sometimes it’s functional, sometimes it’s delusional.
• We can learn to distinguish between these two modes of third-person subjective view.
• We can learn to notice that the first-person subjective view is always there.

Copy, Paste notes

In the “Headless Way” originated by Douglas Harding, they distinguish between two ways of seeing ourselves: the first-person subjective view and the third-person objective view. Suzuki Roshi called these Big Mind and small mind. We might call them impersonal boundless awareness and the person. Both of these dimensions or perspectives co-exist in our human lives. Being awake isn’t about eliminating all sense of being a person or always being in some fantastic state of expanded consciousness far above human problems. But it is about not being lost in our problems, oblivious to the awareness beholding them, and stuck in only seeing the third person view.

Here-Now is the Original Face, the One Consciousness, the unbound presence-awareness that we all have in common. Awareness or presence is not a “thing” we can see or point to or grasp, and yet, it is the common factor in every different experience.

Spiritual awakening points to the recognition of this unbound vastness that we are, this all-inclusive, unconditional love that is always accepting everything, this aware presence that often gets overlooked because attention is habitually focused on the me-story and the dramas in the movie of waking life. The recognition of Big Mind doesn’t mean that all sense of being a particular person disappears forever after. That thought-sense of being “me,” the unique person associated with this particular bodymind organism, continues to appear intermittently, sometimes functionally and sometimes in useless ways that only create suffering and confusion.

We can learn to see how this works and to discern the difference between the functional sense of personhood and the delusional manifestations of it that are forms of suffering and confusion. We can also discover that Big Mind is never actually absent, and we can relax more and more easily into being simply this aware presence and this present experiencing, just exactly as it is.

Added 2024-08-22.