Now, I can agree with this point about looking versus digging. Reading it prompted me to look at your blog. I read this:
KHTK 1A: Looking Introduction[Revised October 30, 2010]
This is a set of essays that have come to be known by the acronym KHTK (from the phrase “Knowing How To Know”). This is the first of the KHTK essays. It introduces LOOKING as the key to knowing how to know.
THEORY
Looking means to observe and notice things for what they are. To know something, you do not have to label it, or use words to describe it. You simply look and recognize something for what it is.
The key idea is:
LOOK AND SIMPLY OBSERVE WHAT IS THERE WITHOUT EXPECTING ANYTHING, OR ATTEMPTING TO GET AN ANSWER.
Any expectation will add extraneous thoughts to what one is looking at. Attempts to get an answer will also add extraneous interpretation to what is there. It is a common experience to have thoughts, labels, evaluations, opinions conclusions, etc., arise in the mind as one looks. When such thoughts are suppressed they color and modify our perception of what is there."..........
Why are you not applying the above to the situation here on ESMB which you feel so persecuted about? You are not applying your own tech to the situation. Seems to me that you are doing and saying everything it says not to do. You keep expecting agreement. Let it go. It works. You say so yourself in what you wrote there.
I am responding to Vin's writing here.
I have spent many hundreds of hours in self-created meditation experiments, aimed at just "looking". Looking "in" and looking "out" (using the physical senses and other possible sensory tools not physical). For example, I have done it with a nice forest scene.
First, I notice that I tended to focus in different areas. At the tree, at a branch, at a piece of bark. I noticed that looking was not as easy as it sounded. Look at what? So, I developed a sort of ability to "back away" a bit, sort of like watching a video game, where you are there watching, yet not focusing specifically on any exact thing other than what falls within your field of vision. Or, like looking through a camera, where you see only what is in the eyepiece.
It's tricky, just being there with your eyes, as a sort of camera lens, and looking at whatever falls within the field of the eyes range. In a sense you must step back a bit from the body and body senses, and see them as part of "out there" along with whatever the sense is registering.
Second, I noticed that as I look at the tree I so often add something to the perception, such as "it is beautiful", "it is part of the cycle of life", "I am catching a moment of eternity", and so forth. I was adding "inner stuff" as I interacted with the "outer stuff".
I learned a long time ago to banish words and verbal thinking from my mind, but I was doing those things on a non-verbal level - but still doing them, copntributing to the perception in some way. For example, when any person looks at a gorgeous sunset and comments, "wow, that is beautiful", he or she is ADDING that entirely to the mix. The person is CREATING that feeling. It does not exist "out there" anywhere. In fact, if you go out in a space ship, a few thousand miles above Earth, there is no sunset to view! It only exists from this vantage point, in a body on Earth.
Third, I noticed that as I changed HOW I looked, it changed what I was looking at! (Theory of relativity applied to human awareness)
So I aimed to get rid of all these personal involvements as I looked. What is REALLY there?
When I hit moments where I took myself out of the loop entirely, well, it all just disappeared! All significance vanishes at that point.
When you take out and remove all extraneous interpretation, in other words vanquish your "viewpoint", everything goes away! Or, said another way, if a tree falls in the woods and there is nobody there to hear it, does it actually make a sound?
As I tried to explain elsewhere, as I currently see it, there is no reality or experience of reality without a viewpoint. And a viewpoint, ANY viewpoint, contains tendencies, traits, slants, opinions of various sorts, no matter how "high" or "advanced".
I came to realize that the aim to entirely vanquish the "self" or "viewpoint" was dumb. Why?
As I currently understand it, each of us are God's way of experiencing his amazing creation. Possibly, you are a part of God just as a rose petal is a part of the rose plant.
You, as a viewpoint, are part of "God" (God being simply
all-that-is and the creator of
all-that-is). Your job then is to become the best viewpoint that you can! Granted, slipping into nothingness is fun, beneficial and therepeutic from time to time (loosing ones personal viewpoint).
Of course, you can also do the same sort of examination internally, with ideas, feelings, body sensations, etc.