Kashmiri Bhatta

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In 1977 Richard Moss was a practicing physician when he experienced a spontaneous state of illumination that irreversibly changed his life and profoundly transformed his understanding of our human condition. With this opening came a new level of sensibility, including a heightened intuition, subtle insight into mystical and spiritual teachings, the ability to sense shifts of attention in others, and a comprehensive kind of intelligence that integrates and brings coherence to many seemingly disparate aspects of the human condition .

Impelled by this opening and its intensity which required virtually continuous self-examination, he took a sabbatical from his medical practice and began a period of withdrawal from his usual activities. For nearly a year he spontaneously meditated for hours each day and read spiritual and depth psychological literature, as well as poetry, and mythology. Above all, he made a careful observation of a new quality of sensibility moving in his body, a kind of current or energy flow. Some thoughts instantly generated emotions and sensations that obscured that flow while others refined the current into a living spaciousness.

First, unquestioned identification with your thinking, specifically your judgments and beliefs. The instant you judge or unquestioningly believe anything about yourself or another you have divided your own mind. This internal mental division is projected into the world, and you perceive a divided world that you engage with reactively. This, in turn generates further divisive thoughts and behaviors and more reactivity that becomes a self-perpetuating state of suffering. Richard refers to this process as mental-emotional looping.

Second, the general lack of what he calls feeling literacy: limited ability in most people to engage with transformative awareness threatening sensations such as naked fear, or fear in all its psychological “fear of” forms such as fear of death, uncertainty, abandonment, etc., with transformative awareness.

He realized that fear can never be defeated at its own level. An internal sense of genuine security can never be achieved, except transitorily, through any form of positive thinking, self-control, emotional self-management, such as through exercise or food, or by medications or new technologies. Rather, the presence of threatening feelings invites you to become a student of consciousness. Fear becomes your teacher, and you learn to turn your attention immediately toward the sensation of fear and stop running away into thinking and strategies for security. You practice bringing a quality of attention to the fear that has no goal or agenda. In other words, you feel the fear and repeatedly relax and stop resisting it. Fear never changes; your self-system, your self-identity that is poorly adapted to experiencing fear is what transforms. You gradually become the spaciousness of your essential consciousness instead of the narrow consciousness of your ego. Feelings move in you like music or weather instead of being barriers or blockages.

Richard realized that feeling is a more primary mode of consciousness than thinking, that the belief in the supremacy of intellect has been and is a dangerous hubris. All neglected feelings or those that are denied, refused, or met defensively, will activate the mind into mental-emotional looping and consequent destructive behaviors. Feelings must be addressed directly with transformative awareness before mental-emotional looping will stop and thinking can be healthy and supportive of true intelligence.

Courtesy - richardmoss.com
- Richard Moss

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