As mentioned in my previous post, Scott Kiloby spoke at the Providence Institute this weekend. I always try to make time when Scott's in town because I find him likeable and very accessible. If I get lost, it's always because I've gotten so relaxed that I've fallen asleep, it's never because he's gotten muddy or incomprehensible. Before I forget, I would like to express my gratitude to Julianne Eanniello for the enormous energy she puts into bringing Scott to the Northeast and making his work more available here.
This post is my attempt to summarize the weekend. This is my own memory and understanding (or misunderstanding) of what was said, so take it with a grain of salt because my memory is as bad as anybody else's, and I'll probably give too little emphasis to anything that didn't sound like my own ideas.
As always, Scott emphasized his practice of resting in awareness. It's quick, simple, and easy, and he recommends that people do it repeatedly as they go through their day. It helps to dislodge the hold that your thoughts, opinions, hopes and worries have over your life. It appears throughout his other teachings like a sort of Swiss Army knife of awakening.
Scott talked about his work in designing the Unfindable Object Inquiry. The gist of the inquiry is that often you can suffer due to a belief in something that is really just a fuzzy abstraction that exists only in thought and language. You might suffer if you believe you are unloveable, so the inquiry would be to try to find "unloveable" as a thing that you could directly perceive. Things you can directly perceive include sights, sounds, smells, tastes, body sensations, thoughts, feelings, emotions, etcetera, but none of those things is the object "unloveable".
Frequently the object of the inquiry is a notion of oneself as deficient in some way, "unloveable" being an example. So you go looking for "the person who fails at everything" or "the person people avoid at parties" or "the person whose parents can't stand her". So Scott talks a lot about the "deficient self".
In working with lots of people, Scott has found that when an unfindable object carries an emotional charge, it's because it's difficult to separate the thoughts (words and pictures arising in the mind) from the raw sensation of pain that arises with the thought (such as "I'm unloveable"). The inquiry is designed to pick those apart, and allow you to put aside the thoughts and focus on the feelings.
There are a few habitual strategies that human beings use to deal with painful feelings. We can suppress them, we can try to understand them, we can try to control them, we can distract ourselves, and there might be one or two that I'm forgetting. The point is, we human beings employ thoughts to somehow avoid a direct experience of the painful feelings. But the thoughts cause more suffering than the feelings did.
The direct experience isn't as bad as we fear it will be. Scott's not the first teacher to say this. We should put aside the thoughts and simply feel the feelings, so we can discover that they are tolerable. Then we can forget all those unnecessary complicated thoughts and get on with our lives.
This post is my attempt to summarize the weekend. This is my own memory and understanding (or misunderstanding) of what was said, so take it with a grain of salt because my memory is as bad as anybody else's, and I'll probably give too little emphasis to anything that didn't sound like my own ideas.
As always, Scott emphasized his practice of resting in awareness. It's quick, simple, and easy, and he recommends that people do it repeatedly as they go through their day. It helps to dislodge the hold that your thoughts, opinions, hopes and worries have over your life. It appears throughout his other teachings like a sort of Swiss Army knife of awakening.
Scott talked about his work in designing the Unfindable Object Inquiry. The gist of the inquiry is that often you can suffer due to a belief in something that is really just a fuzzy abstraction that exists only in thought and language. You might suffer if you believe you are unloveable, so the inquiry would be to try to find "unloveable" as a thing that you could directly perceive. Things you can directly perceive include sights, sounds, smells, tastes, body sensations, thoughts, feelings, emotions, etcetera, but none of those things is the object "unloveable".
Frequently the object of the inquiry is a notion of oneself as deficient in some way, "unloveable" being an example. So you go looking for "the person who fails at everything" or "the person people avoid at parties" or "the person whose parents can't stand her". So Scott talks a lot about the "deficient self".
In working with lots of people, Scott has found that when an unfindable object carries an emotional charge, it's because it's difficult to separate the thoughts (words and pictures arising in the mind) from the raw sensation of pain that arises with the thought (such as "I'm unloveable"). The inquiry is designed to pick those apart, and allow you to put aside the thoughts and focus on the feelings.
There are a few habitual strategies that human beings use to deal with painful feelings. We can suppress them, we can try to understand them, we can try to control them, we can distract ourselves, and there might be one or two that I'm forgetting. The point is, we human beings employ thoughts to somehow avoid a direct experience of the painful feelings. But the thoughts cause more suffering than the feelings did.
The direct experience isn't as bad as we fear it will be. Scott's not the first teacher to say this. We should put aside the thoughts and simply feel the feelings, so we can discover that they are tolerable. Then we can forget all those unnecessary complicated thoughts and get on with our lives.
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