Disclaimer: I am not sure I’ve done what you think of as Looking, but all your metaphors make sense to me.
If I “get” the general thing, then would you agree that aside from Fake Frameworks, experience with Focusing must help? Especially for people who haven’t yet meditated much or find the idea of a “non-verbal thought” elusive.
I’m thinking of Focusing as targeting something that can also happen in meditation, but could take some beginner meditators a long time until they get direct experience with. It’s the way that your mind can suddenly produce a new awareness or new knowledge, without any conscious chain-of-thought, any verbal reasoning behind it.
Focusing hammers that home again and again, yes, there’s a way and it’s right there. It gave me a lot of confidence to try the mental move of “step back and wait until I See Something” in a variety of contexts.
PS: Thank you for pointing out the purpose of koans. I had “dissolved” them, but now I see, that perhaps I can try to answer them anyway!
I’ve changed how I want to talk about all this stuff quite a bit since 2018. I don’t talk about “Looking” for the most part anymore. Not for carefully thought-out reasons. I just don’t like the feel of trying to describe this stuff that way anymore. It feels over-reified and too… prideful. Not just about me, but as in, the framework seems to imply a skill or capacity a person has or doesn’t have, and that it’s better if they have it. I no longer think that’s how grace works.
With that caveat: yes probably? I’m guessing Focusing can help. I’m not sure though!
My impression these days is that the kenshō “insight” is basically what you recognize when you stop restricting your perceptions with your cognitive frames. The tricky part is that what I just said is a cognitive frame, so the conceptual mind can take what I just said and claim to have some kind of understanding of the kenshō thing. But it can’t. It literally cannot understand it. It’s like an LLM with a pure text interface talking about truly appreciating visual art: it might give some amazing and even helpful analysis, but it doesn’t have the right type of input or processing to see a painting at all.
Focusing might help by giving the system a way of orienting to things in a non-conceptual way. The conceptual mind can still create frames during and after, but they’re only kind of helpful to the Focusing process, so the conceptual mind can’t lead the Focusing effort.
“You are not the king of your brain. You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going, ‘A most judicious choice, sire’.”
(Here I’m hinting at viewing “you” as the identity structure that lives within the conceptual mind — what some spiritual/mystical places sometimes mean when they say “ego”.)
So, that’s my guess. In short, I’d guess yes? But I really don’t know.
Disclaimer: I am not sure I’ve done what you think of as Looking, but all your metaphors make sense to me.
If I “get” the general thing, then would you agree that aside from Fake Frameworks, experience with Focusing must help? Especially for people who haven’t yet meditated much or find the idea of a “non-verbal thought” elusive.
I’m thinking of Focusing as targeting something that can also happen in meditation, but could take some beginner meditators a long time until they get direct experience with. It’s the way that your mind can suddenly produce a new awareness or new knowledge, without any conscious chain-of-thought, any verbal reasoning behind it.
Focusing hammers that home again and again, yes, there’s a way and it’s right there. It gave me a lot of confidence to try the mental move of “step back and wait until I See Something” in a variety of contexts.
PS: Thank you for pointing out the purpose of koans. I had “dissolved” them, but now I see, that perhaps I can try to answer them anyway!
I’ve changed how I want to talk about all this stuff quite a bit since 2018. I don’t talk about “Looking” for the most part anymore. Not for carefully thought-out reasons. I just don’t like the feel of trying to describe this stuff that way anymore. It feels over-reified and too… prideful. Not just about me, but as in, the framework seems to imply a skill or capacity a person has or doesn’t have, and that it’s better if they have it. I no longer think that’s how grace works.
With that caveat: yes probably? I’m guessing Focusing can help. I’m not sure though!
My impression these days is that the kenshō “insight” is basically what you recognize when you stop restricting your perceptions with your cognitive frames. The tricky part is that what I just said is a cognitive frame, so the conceptual mind can take what I just said and claim to have some kind of understanding of the kenshō thing. But it can’t. It literally cannot understand it. It’s like an LLM with a pure text interface talking about truly appreciating visual art: it might give some amazing and even helpful analysis, but it doesn’t have the right type of input or processing to see a painting at all.
Focusing might help by giving the system a way of orienting to things in a non-conceptual way. The conceptual mind can still create frames during and after, but they’re only kind of helpful to the Focusing process, so the conceptual mind can’t lead the Focusing effort.
(Here I’m hinting at viewing “you” as the identity structure that lives within the conceptual mind — what some spiritual/mystical places sometimes mean when they say “ego”.)
So, that’s my guess. In short, I’d guess yes? But I really don’t know.