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#Post#: 43261--------------------------------------------------
Stop Following Instructions
By: Zara Songull Date: January 11, 2022, 6:11 am
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Here are my instructions for how to stop following instructions.
Follow these steps when you encounter a new practice,
meditation, or contemplation you’ve never tried before.
1.) Read through the instructions carefully, and try to grok
their intended meaning. Many “spiritual” practices are trying to
get at something abstract or subtle. Sometimes they’re
attempting to guide you to an experience that defies
description. So the words are often open to interpretation. Make
your best guess, which is usually as good as it gets.
2.) Read the instructions again, trying out each step, awkwardly
if necessary. Try to figure out how to put the words into
action. Perhaps even read through a third time.
3.) If the instructions already make sense to you at this point,
do a little fist pump to celebrate your grasp of the new
practice, and enjoy its benefits. If you can discover the real
essence of the practice, you can often get back to that essence
without needing to go through all the steps.
4.) If the instructions don’t make sense to you, see if you can
create a new version that does. Play with each instruction.
Tweak them, vary them, and rearrange them to suit you better.
5.) Basically, if the instructions aren’t working for you, stop
following the instructions. If the instructions already got you
to the intended destination, stop following the instructions.
6.) As a final step, there is no final step, because you should
have already stopped following the instructions by now!
The problem is that you really can’t know if you got it right.
Even if you think you got it, you don’t know if what you got was
what you were meant to get. On the other hand, you may be
certain you got it wrong, so you made up your own variation. But
that variation may get you closer to the intended mark anyway.
You can’t know.
And the real reason you can’t know if you got it right is that
the person giving the instructions may not have gotten it right
either. Why do you assume they know what they’re doing? Either
they just made the practice up, or they learned it from someone
who learned it from someone who learned it from someone who just
made it up.
The idea that there’s a right way has to be a myth. Just think
back to what it must have been like in the olden days.
The first yoga teacher training, as I’m sure you can imagine,
was a total bust. None of the asanas had been invented yet, so
there was nothing to teach!
The first dude who tried to do the tai chi form kept kicking
himself because he couldn’t remember any of the movements. But
then he remembered that there were no movements to remember. No
one had yet come up with any!
Meditation practice wasn’t any better. Everyone kept looking
around at each other trying to figure out if they were doing it
right, but there were no instructions yet, so no one knew!
For every spiritual practice that’s been around for years or
decades or millenia, someone was the first person to try it.
Someone had to innovate every single form of meditation, every
yoga asana, every tai chi movement - and every other practice
you can think of. To come up with it in the first place, they
messed around and experimented and happened upon something that
seemed to work.
That was always Jed’s process, and it’s mine as well.
He would be trying to investigate something curious or
mysterious. He’d mess around and make up a new practice that was
always partially ripped off of something else he picked up along
the way. He’d try it on himself, refine it, maybe give up on it
and return to it later, and finally try it out on his friends.
He didn’t know the one true way. He just came up with one
possible way.
Then he was faced with the task of figuring out how the heck to
write down the instructions. He’d do his best to craft precise
words, knowing they would resonate instantly with some students,
not make any sense to others, and be exactly the wrong practice
for some people anyway. He almost always emphasized that
students are better off reading the instructions carefully and
repeatedly. Then at least you have a chance. But he knew the
instructions would only ever get them so far.
Just because it worked for Jed, or works for some of his
students, doesn’t mean it’ll work for you. If it doesn’t, you
can probably come up with a better way.
None of the people who invented any of the practices you’ve
learned, including Jed, were any more qualified than you. No one
who later improved upon those practices, or came up with
interesting variations on them, was any more qualified than you.
Everyone is equally qualified to study their own nature, to
investigate how consciousness works, to find out how energy
seems to move through them when they channel it this way or
that. You are as qualified as anyone, and significantly more so
when it comes to finding out what works for you in particular.
As a disclaimer, I should probably say that in the spirituality
business, a lot of people believe that the only way to get where
you’re going is to have a live teacher, maybe one who will
transmit something to you that can only be transmitted in
person, or perhaps just someone who can correct you individually
until you finally get it right.
But I won’t make that disclaimer because around these parts,
there is no right way to follow. You have to find your own way.
Recruit help from whatever quarters you can find it, but it’s
still ultimately going to be your way.
Everyone learns differently. Some people seem to like a lot of
guidance and to try to get all their numerous questions
answered. Some people like the rules and structure to be given
to them by someone in authority. That’s a fine place to start
your journey. The journey gets way more interesting, however,
once you start to do your own experiments, when you make it your
mission to figure out the stuff no one can teach you anyway.
It’s always a solo journey that gets you the rest of the way
home.
So, when you’re picking up something new, squeeze whatever you
can from the instructions as presented. Then stop following
instructions and find your own way.
This is particularly true of the instructions I am giving you
right now.
Love,
Zara
#Post#: 43262--------------------------------------------------
Re: Stop Following Instructions
By: Spiritless Worm Date: January 12, 2022, 5:52 am
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Wow, what an eye opener. Thanks Zara for this post :)
#Post#: 43263--------------------------------------------------
Re: Stop Following Instructions
By: kcmiller Date: January 12, 2022, 10:00 am
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I am so grateful. Thank You!!!
#Post#: 43266--------------------------------------------------
Re: Stop Following Instructions
By: Prashant Date: January 21, 2022, 1:25 am
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Thanks Zara for this.
My observations: The doer, who thinks is doing the
contemplation, wants some specific outcome will always create
diversions instead of keeping things simple.
Trying and trying it fails. However, there are few moments when
you are not trying to do anything, relaxed and contemplation
happens in auto-mode.
You just watch.
Some changes/dissolving happen, little by little, towards the
shore.
#Post#: 43274--------------------------------------------------
Re: Stop Following Instructions
By: Smiling Date: March 27, 2022, 9:02 am
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Thank you, Zara. Love you.
#Post#: 43279--------------------------------------------------
Re: Stop Following Instructions
By: Terminus_Est Date: April 20, 2022, 10:10 am
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So perfect! For a return to form, from a form which has been
rendered somewhat...nay, mostly (by comparison)....progressively
formless.
TY Jed! *sigh*. For.....everything. Your death was time-fully
timeless and, as per what may be inadvertently implied by the
post-ghosted heading, was and is....of course...impeccably
inserted into the middle of my suspended instruction.
TY....Infinity! You are the (my) Peerless Prankster, always and
forever, amen :D
The husk is gone, the seed is born...I'm sure...in the many you
left in your passage. It's born in me, that's for fcking sure!
I indulged, of course I did! To the max, baby....pedal to the
metal...Thelma and Louise, over the edge with foot firmly on the
gas....karma burned bright, and on both ends to
boot!....twice-as-strong and half-as-long, in the words of the
Maker (before being unmade by his creation) to his "son", The
Replicant. And thus burnt...and thus burnt out.....and thus,
gone baby gone. There's nothing left! Where is it....this
historical slavery to my desire? My compulsions? Just where TF
did it go?! IDK...I really don't
Halfway through Nav....mid-breath....thunder-struck, shock and
awe. Where's the rest?! I screamed....WTF?!! I'm empty, Jed!
Where's the goddam rest?! Where's the line...the GD plot line?!
Cheshire Cat smile, as you disappear in the branches of a fever
dreamed, rabbit-holed, rainbow-limned tree. Ha! :D. You know,
ofc....well, ofc you don't...but that's the beautiful point,
n'est pas? You know that you don't know! And left me to
un-figure that one out on my own...all alone. Even your
helper/collaborator left my mail box empty (poor sot....too
unruly for you? Too unstable, too ...too disruptive? Too
distasteful. You better un-figure this sh1t out...before it's
too late). In the hands of who? IDK, who cares? Not me :D. I
was left hanging, and that's the beautiful point. Your hapless
Counterpart (great tip, on that show....the point of which
escapes me and finds me from day to beautifully bristling,
bustling day...in ways, unknown).
You're the only one who left me alone....to be myself. All the
way, baby...pedal to the metal (you get it, don't you? You
paradoxical gear head-loving/carbon emission-loathing conundrum,
You!). An indulgent mo-fo, left to indulge to the bitter
end...to find the sweetness just beyond. You let me
FINISH....gave me the space to find the empty, liquid center at
the bitter end of myself. You let me tip, destabilized and
careening amidst my own, living, folly-born and
foolishly-expressed involutional micro-myth....Crazed and Rabid
Coyote Man....across my own event horizon to be spagettified and
ego-crushed....stripped and thinned to my primordial essence as
I approach my own singularity...OMG, this pit is BOTTOMLESS!
Fck procedure! Fck the cloying, smug, repugnant, lifeless
"instruction"....fck the Left-Overs left to silt and
sediment....left to ego-orchestration....left for dead for
historians and archeologists to dust and brush and mutter over
for what? for god-knows-how-long. Scat masters, all of them.
The living thing....the only one that matters that they'll never
ever see or find....not that they care to....is long
gone....eating the ripened fruit of life itself, it's so long
gone. Let them have their dried sh1t to break apart and feed
into all that cutting edge, high tech, waste of ingenuity.
From high-tech, to low-tech, to no-tech. That.....is the way.
The Way. No more looking and picking and fiddling about.
That's done :). "How To Meditate"....jeeeezus fcking christ on a
crutch.
I'm on it, friend. Live through me, as you wish....whatever's
left. Live and breathe through this aging, youth-ing body born
to die. I'm all growns up, Mommy...I'm all growns up! I feel
supple and aware...an intelligent, flexible, formless, limber,
new born babe with thinning/graying hair. What a freak! LOL!
I'm approaching the End, Jed...and all I seeing is
theever-emerging, fractal-zoom stamens and petals and stamens
and petals and.....of an ever, blooming beginning which ends and
begins and ends and begins and ends and begins again and again.
Like Billy, freaked and released by his own future-self
rendezvous saying
"Hello....Farewell....Hello....Farewell...Hello"....on and on
and on, forever and ever....
Amen
#Post#: 43304--------------------------------------------------
Re: Stop Following Instructions
By: Rog Date: May 23, 2023, 8:57 pm
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Just as a way of offering admiration and agreement to this
advice, I have a really simple change I made once which helped
me.
The instruction given was to repeat the mantra "Who am I?" I
actually did understand the whole point of it. I did want to
know the truth. I KNEW I didn't know the truth of it. But I
kept getting stuck on "who". What does "who" even mean? What
is a "who?" How could there be a "who" at the source of
anything at all? A "who" is like a weird modifier reserved only
for something like this human domain with unique individual
personalities or something like that. What is a "who" actually
anyway?
So I changed it to "what." And "what" may not be entirely
correct either by the end, but it sure brought me a whole lot
closer and much more fastidiously than "who" qas going to.
"What" worked for me. At least I understood what a "what" was.
A "who" seemed too insane to follow. Who? What the fuck is a
who?
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