Choose Again

feeling selfy, part two

So self, or selfiness, is a universal experience. It's that feeling of being—of "I am-ness." And it's a lot like water. Water can appear in many different forms, depending on the container. It can be mixed with lots of substances, but it is essentially just what it is. Water is not the container it is in. It is not a lake or an ocean or a bottle of diet coke. It is one water. You could get spiritual and say, "water is one."

In the same way, self is one, regardless of the seeming form-wrapper with which we are distracted in time and space. This can be ecstatically experienced, as in the experiences of oneness we all hear about and envy. But the experience is not important because the truth simply is.

That truth is who you are. And that truth is right here, right now, and never anywhere else. Self — awarized energy — is the content of this moment. It does not exist outside of this present moment. This ordinary now.  Look around you. This is all self. Self is not separate from what is. Just like water is not separate from itself—only temporarily molded by various shapes. Just like the dreams you had last night were not separate from your mind.

So we have a seeming choice of what to identify with, and the choice seems to be a matter of attention. The fact that we can shift the attention of this awarized energy is miraculous. We can identify with the communal beingness that pervades and perfuses this very moment, or we can identify with the apparent form-wrappers, and call them "me." It's like one of those optical illusion drawings where you can see either the face or the vase.

By form wrappers, I mean every phenomenon that can be perceived. Thoughts, feelings, experiences, bodies, cells, coffee cups, and so on.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with (as in the clothespin analogy of my last post) taking a bunch of localized temporary phenomena, painting a face on it and calling it "me." There is no implied sin or wrongness in it whatsoever. It's a choice and it can be fun for a while.

The only thing wrong with it is that when you identify with what is temporary, and all the wrappers, all perceived phenomena—even the experience of oneness—are temporary appearances, you suffer. And you suffer because when you identify with something that can fade, something that is temporary, you feel incomplete, insufficient, not enough, endangered. And when you feel incomplete, there is something wrong with now.

The truth you are looking for is right here, right now, THIS. Getting back to the opening paragraph of my last post—the paradox.

The reason this is so hard to accept is that we have complaints about now. We like some aspects of now but other aspects, not so much. We differ with now by becoming involved with thought-stories about how now should be different. When we engage with and identify with these thought-stories, we become different from now, and we feel separate from it. Hence the paradox. When you release your grievances with this seemingly humble ordinary now.... hmmm.

In truth we are not separate, cannot be separate, but we can temporarily experience an illusion of separation. Nothing wrong with it, but there is suffering in that.

In ACIM terms, giving up attack thoughts means ceasing to differ with now. This, right here. This very ordinary moment. Because this is it. Feel the resistance to that message. But then ask yourself if any other moment ever exists.

It's very, very simple. Kind of a Cinderella story, really.

feeling selfy

When you are in a long-term relationship with someone—a mate, a child, a sibling—and they have traits that bug you, you may discover that the quickest way to behavioral change is to let go of the idea of behavioral change. Unconditional acceptance, which takes a little effort in terms of figuring out where to put your focus, often results in the changes you wanted in the first place. Of course, by then you don't care much either way, because acceptance relieves you of the initial resistance, which was the only suffering you actually felt. In ACIM terms we could say that forgiveness keeps you from making the dream real.

So here we are altogether, apparently, in this dream situation.

Instead of talking about making the dream real or not making the dream real, because in truth the dream cannot be made real, I think it's more helpful to talk about the ways in which we can extract our attention from the hypnotic grip of the so-called dream character.

It's not so much that you don't exist. It's that you don't exist in the way you think you do. You are not the dream character. It (you) has no more substance in this waking dream, than it does in your nighttime dreams.

What it has is temporary, changing, appearance. Except here's the thing—it's not that "it has" temporary changing appearance. It's that it IS temporary changing appearance. It's mesmerizing local appearance—like the cobras in old cartoons of snake charmers. It, the appearance, with all its attached thought and sensation clusters, is hypnotic.

So hypnotic that we think there is a boundary to it and an actual "doer" within it, making it happen—"me." The truth seems to be that it—the appearance—is an effect with no cause. You know how a child can take a clothespin and paint two eyes and a mouth on it and it becomes a doll, with a name and a real identity that can be made to experience all kinds of emotions? And yet we know, as adults, that this is a piece of wood carved into a clothespin?

It's the same thing happening here. We have designated a bunch of localized phenomena as "me." In truth, me is a lot like the clothespin doll.

So who or what are we, if we are not this shifting, changing appearance that we suffer so to defend and keep alive?

Let's pull back mentally from the scene and look at a larger picture. Obviously there is self. There is the sense of "I am." Nobody can deny that. Or let's say, instead of using a noun and a verb, which connotes something that may be incorrect, that there is "selfiness." We feel selfy. There is definitely something selfy happening here.

And now I have to go to work! to be continued.....

nothing special

If I were to say to you that this, this here and now—your ordinary awareness of being, is what is being talked about, you'd resist.

If I said, it's THIS, here and now, right here—your normal everyday experience—your very "I am-ness" that is being talked about, you'd say, no, can't be.

If I said, notice the 'you' that you are between thoughts and imaginings—that silent non-conceptual foundation awareness of being— right here, right now—you'd say okay, but this can't be it.

But if you look closely at why you resist this understanding, why 'this can't be it,' the only answer that comes is this thought: "Because NOW is not good enough."

That, right there—that 'now is not good enough' is the whole ball of wax.

What can the meaning of forgiveness possibly be if it is not "there's nothing wrong with NOW."

looking at the i

Are you a separate self? Are you a person? Is "person" a valid construct?

What is the nature of the "me" thought? What does it feel like?

One characteristic it has, is the feeling that it desires to get something to complete itself. And it fears losing what it has already gotten because that seems to endanger its feeling of completion.

So there's:
1. The feeling of incompleteness and vulnerability—being endangered.
2. The desire to get and the temporary experience of having.
3. The fear of loss and the temporary experience of not having.

Around these three points are clusters of thoughts, feelings, sensations and experiences, all constantly reoccurring in the same pattern, yet applied to everything from getting a cup of coffee to seeking enlightenment. We use the same tools for everything: I do not have. I want. I will try to get. What I get I will defend.

These tools belong to the sense of the separate self. They imply that in some imagined future we will have that cup of coffee and will also be awakened, enlightened. They imply that enlightenment or awakening is in the future. The incomplete separate self cannot understand anything that is not separated from itself by either time (it's in the future) or space (it's somewhere else).

The separate self always looks elsewhere for its identity, trying to get something to fix itself or add to itself, because it does not feel whole. From its point of view, it must do something all the time to keep itself repaired and defended. Dedicated to this goal is its only mental tool: the conceptual process. Thoughts, feelings, sensations, conclusions.

The false self, the separate self, is an erroneous concept arising from these clusters of thoughts, feelings, sensations and conclusions. The false self IS these clusters. The sense that there is an identity there arises simultaneously with involvement in its conclusions. In truth, there is nobody home.

And yet, there you sit. If thoughts, feelings, sensations and experiences are constantly changing, then clearly they cannot contain or demonstrate a self—a self that cannot exist without a future in which it will be fixed.

What happens if you give up the idea of a future in which you will be fixed?

It can mean only one of two things: you are broken and will remain so. Or you have been mistaken about who you are. Is there another you?

If the other you is not concerned with creating a future that will fix it, it must be whole right here and now. And it must be here, right here, right now, not separated, even by a breath, from your own native sense of being and awareness.

I used to talk, way back a few posts ago, about the whole "movie theater" of life. You know, you are the projector, or the bulb in the projector, and you are mistaking yourself for the drama on the screen. Now I have noticed that you are the living awareness in which not only the whole theater, but the universe in which it arises, appears. Everything passes through your living awareness, and you are not separate from anything that comes into appearance and then disappears, within it.

I'm not talking about anything separate from you, sitting there, right now. Your ordinary sense of Being. Nothing special. How could it be something special? Then it would be separate from you!

From the Workbook, lesson 125:

He speaks from nearer than your heart to you. His Voice is closer than your hand. His Love is everything you are and that He is; the same as you, and you the same as He.

the shimmering mirage

Lately, as you've undoubtedly noticed, this has become less of a Course in Miracles blog (not that it was much of a one anyway) and more a blog in which I seem to be trying to communicate something very simple that winds up sounding very complicated.

I'm going to keep on trying to communicate this very simple thing that I have finally seen, because it's an utterly worthwhile thing to see if you have been a spiritual seeker all your life—or ever.

It was always very frustrating to me to hear the whole "you do not exist" thing. Clearly I believed I existed and I personally found it unhelpful to hear those words. As any ACIM student can tell you, it's somewhat of a relief to hear that the world doesn't actually exist—that it's a dream—but it's entirely uncomfortable to realize that "doesn't exist" means YOU.

It's decidedly not that a real you is walking around in an unreal dream. You, sitting there at your computer, are a figment. And yet you know that you exist. How do we reconcile these two facts while still avoiding bludgeoning ourselves with unhelpful catch phrases?

Here's one helpful one: The Separation Never Occurred.

Let's just leave that there for a minute.

The you who believes that there is something wrong—the you who believes that if you could only forgive enough, if you could only be good enough, if you could only be mindful and meditative enough and have a quiet enough mind, you'd awaken—that you—will never be able to achieve the goal of awakening.

I'm going to try to explain why, and then to give you the good news, so bear with me as I dive into metaphor.

You know how when you're dreaming at night you are often involved in a task that eventually becomes Sisyphean? You start preparing a meal and suddenly the ingredients begin changing and disappearing. You arrive at school only to realize that somehow you've managed to avoid going to any classes and it's midterm day. You open a book and discover that you can't read. You try to dial a phone but it becomes inexplicably difficult to find the right numbers. And yet, you keep trying.

The same thing is happening here in this life. You, the dream figure, have grown tired of the dream and you want to wake up. You enter the spiritual path and you try everything you can think of, only to find yourself a perhaps more civil dream figure but no closer to awakening.

Here's why: You cannot solve a problem that does not exist. The knot cannot be untied because it is a dream knot. The problem does not exist.

The experience of form—any kind of object—whether it's a thought, an emotion, a worry, an anxiety, a pain, a sensation, a vision, an experience, a joy, an ecstasy, a teapot or an idea—the experience of form is always shifting and changing. It is always temporary. It is by its temporary nature that we know it is not real. We cannot find THAT WHICH IS constantly changing. There is just change.

You, the you you think you are, belongs to that change-appearance.

Yet right now, in this very moment, right here and now and nowhere else, ever, is your true nature. You can call it whatever you like, but it has been here forever and it has not been harmed or changed or affected in any way by the dream.

It is not somewhere else. It is not in the future, in some future of awakening. It is not in some memory of an experience of oneness. It is shining behind and through all thought, all form. It is that which contains the shimmering mirage and is aware of it. It is the part of you that can be distilled down into the two words, "I am." Formless, clear, aware, shining. It is there always and has been there always and is not something to be earned or achieved.

Nothing you can think applies to this nature. Nothing you can think affects it. Nothing you can think describes or explains the fact that you ARE, right here, right now—aware. Always aware.

It is as though you are the ocean, yet you thought you were the froth on top of the waves. Or you are the sky yet you thought you were the clouds. There is nothing to be done. It doesn't even need to be seen. Even when your attention is trapped by the dream and you're back to being a froth bubble or a cloud, you are still what you are, and the froth bubble experience is temporary. There is no danger of loss. Only bubbles break.

From A Course in Miracles, Chapter 31:

The concept of the self stands like a shield, a silent barricade before the truth, and hides it from your sight.

attention

In a nighttime dream, if you pay attention or remember back, you'll realize that identity is sometimes within the dream body, sometimes outside of the dream body, watching it, and sometimes both simultaneously. It shifts from character to character in the dream—sometimes you are "you" and then you are someone else temporarily.

The sense of self is extremely mobile, and yet it doesn't perceive this about itself because its attention is trapped by the drama of the dream.

It's all a matter of attention. I don't really know how to define attention. It seems to be the ability of awareness to focus primarily on one object, within the realm of perception. Everything within the realm of perception is non-existing, so no matter where the focus goes, there is no answer possible.

Attention is probably what Ken Wapnick calls the 'decision-maker.' It exists outside of time and space and is therefore not accessible to the mind as an understandable concept. There are many different ways to entice attention out of the dream world of thought, and into the present moment of awareness. A Course in Miracles offers several of them. So do many other methods and pointers. Regardless of what is done or not done, both are seeming to exist simultaneously anyway. But there is suffering occurring only when identifying with the world of thought.

There is no moral implication involved in where attention goes. There is just the choice of whether to suffer or to experience peace.

Although the ego can seem solid, it's a mistake to assume that it has any power of its own. It certainly has the ability to trap attention. But the trapping of attention and the attention that is entrapped are codependent.

It's constantly moving and creating drama that doesn't exist. But the choice of where to put our attention is ours at all times. The problem is that when we are identified with the world of thought-dream-ego, we think in its terms and look in all the wrong places for the way out.

It wants to do something and bring itself along. You want to awaken, and still be the dream-self. This is not possible. There is no dream-self—and no solution at the level of the problem.

As Guy Finley always used to say, "Come out of the How, into the Now."

There is no way out but here.

the myth of the broken "me"

I only recently began to understand this, and so my language around it is pretty clunky. Bear with me if it seems disjointed for the moment.

I know that many of you feel stuck in the "seeking and striving and trying to become something better" syndrome. So many of you are trying desperately to awaken and feeling disheartened that your efforts are not producing results.

This is because the "you" who is trying to awaken—the "you" who believes it must perfect itself—is fictional. It is a false sense of self produced by the very thoughts that are causing you pain.

Let's talk about how forgiveness (for the Course students) applies to this state of affairs. Forgiveness, in Course terms, means the relinquishing of attack thoughts (defining attack thoughts as meaning that "I want things to be different from the way they are").

It means realizing that the mind you identify as your own is completely irrelevant in its judging and analyzing and naming. All thoughts this mind can think—all of the ways in which it defines "the problem" are null and void.

Forgiveness means realizing that nothing has ever happened here. No one has ever done anything to you, nothing has ever actually been done, period.

Try turning a spotlight on the "you" you think you are for a moment. If the separation never actually happened, the "you" who is trying to awaken, the "you" who is suffering, the "you" who is trying to do the lessons and get out of the trap—that you—that me—does not actually exist. Look at it. If the separation never happened, there is no separate self.

There is no need to awaken because there is no sleeping "you." Therein, for the Course students, lies the Atonement. There never was a broken you, a you that needed to be fixed. It did not happen. Your attention is simply temporarily trapped in a delusion. That entrapment has no effect. It does not affect who you Are.

What IS awake, is of necessity NOT anything that can be thought or perceived (perception denotes separation). And since the separation never occurred, it must be already here. Already right here, right now. Right here, right now, is the light of awareness.

Desiring an experience that you believe you do not have is strictly within the boundaries of the thought-derived ego-self. The wanter, the striver, the one who needs there to be a future in which there is no pain and suffering—that very self—is a fictional idea. There is never anything but right here, right now, where You always are.

And Who you Are is not broken.

it's a matter of where attention is placed

There are normal dreams, in which we don't realize we are dreaming. In these dreams, everything—even the most ridiculous and strangely shifting scenarios are responded to by the dream self as though they were real. So a crisis in the dream is terrifying, and a reward in the dream causes elation, and so on.

Then there are those dreams in which we realize we are dreaming, but we are still emotionally involved with the dream. We may know it's a dream monster we are running from, but we don't stop running—we are still 51% convinced of its reality. And 49% is not enough to bestow lucidity.

If we compare this to our situation as spiritual seekers within the dream we call life, we may have an inkling, a germ of an idea that this is a dream, yet we are still reacting to the situations, thoughts, feelings, pains and desires of the dream character as though they were real. We are still rummaging through the dream, running from the monster of self, or guilt, or obligation, or fear, and searching for the exit door, within the dream. We will never find the exit door within the terms of the dream.

All of the terms of the dream involve rescuing or fixing this separate character we call "me." We want to reduce the pain of me. We try to transform "me" into something better—something more holy, more kind, more forgiving—believing that somehow this will result in a more benevolent dream. It may. But it is still the dream.

It is always still the dream as long as we are identifying with "me."

When you become lucid in a dream, attention shifts from the dream character—me—to awareness itself. With this realization or shift in present moment identification, the dream becomes completely workable, because identification with the dream character has ceased. Awareness itself has no fear. It sees no problem in the dream because it knows the dream as being within itself. It is That within in which the dream is occurring.

keep it simple

It's important to remember that nothing here makes sense. There is nothing to be gained by analysis of this conundrum, because the thinking mind itself is chaotic and incapable of being anything but that.

However, it is fair to say that until you completely stop differing with what actually IS—not some glorified idea of what should be—not some 'spiritualized' idea of attainable or unattainable perfection or oneness—but what actually IS within your spectrum of daily, average, nothing-special perception right here, right now, in this very present moment—there will be no peace.

taking another look

When I first started this blog, the header quoted one of my favorite lines from ACIM, "Salvation is the escape from concepts."

I thought I understood what it meant, but now I see that I need to go deeper.

For example, when the Course asks me to understand that I am not a body, and I do the lessons that say, "I am not a body, I am free, for I am still as God created me," I could take that a step further and wonder, "If I am not a body, can I be a mother?" What is "mother?"

Can you be a son? If this is a dream, as I seem to be willing to accept, have I actually, ever, been born? Is there a you? Or a me?

To escape from concepts we need to look at all of them. All concepts are beliefs about reality.

You know how when you are really tired in the morning and your alarm clock is going off, beeping, beeping, and you begin to dream about an annoying sound that might be a car alarm, or a jackhammer, or a repeatedly shrieking bird, only to awaken and discover that it was none of those things?

Within the dream you were imposing a concept upon the sound, and that concept instantaneously created the appearance of an object you took as real.

Concepts become, then, both a place to hide (and hide from) awareness, and a way of making ourselves separate from it, and, in this case, a false victim of it.

All concepts, whether the concept is "mother" or "teapot" or "me," have unspoken, implied demands attached to them. We make ourselves their servants.

When the mind touches a concept, there is a subtle pain. Pain occurs any time the mind touches what does not exist, what can be threatened, what is temporary—past, future, me.

When the mind is fully in the present moment, and quiet, concepts can float through the sky of mind and not be touched. Not be identified with. When you hop on a concept and ride along with it, it gives a self to the concept and the concept in turn gives you a self.

And it hurts a bit. It is suffering. So just notice. Just notice. Be the awareness that you are and notice when you are riding along on a concept. You can choose not to suffer. That's where the choice lies. Salvation is the escape from concepts.

"We are That, 'That' meaning the seeming place in awareness where awareness shines out. But in ignorance of the true nature, That we are, that seeming place in awareness is called me or I."—Sailor Bob Adamson

the difference between seeing and getting

In my last post I used the analogy of the movie theater and talked about the idea that when you change your thoughts, or in ACIM terms, choose the Holy Spirit over the ego (express it as you will) the movie you are projecting on the screen of this dream we call life, changes. Another way to look at it would be to say that as you change your thoughts, you shift probabilities or scripts. Be that as it may, the system, although seemingly infinitely varied, is finite—a closed system. Nothing within it lasts. Everything is born, decays and dies. That's the underlying truth. It's entirely unsatisfying in any lasting way.

So this realization of unsatisfactoriness, as the Buddhists call it, is what gets us to finally grow tired of the cineplex and risk walking out of the theater.

We begin to realize that the next movie, no matter how great, will still be born, decay and die. We begin to be willing to risk moving out of the cozy confines of what we know, because what we know is so obviously limited.

Do we owe anything to the theater of dreams? Are we under any obligation to produce a beautiful dream? Do we have an obligation to stay within the theater and try to convince others to walk out? I don't believe so. In the act of walking out, we open the door to the theater and let in light. That light remains within the mind. That light makes the movie on screen a bit less real-seeming—and minds are joined.

We created the theater, and we can abandon the theater. What we don't understand, is exactly why or how we created the theater in the first place. We cannot understand the mechanism, because we ARE the mechanism. To understand the mechanism, we need to cease being who we are, which is another way of saying that we need to put, in the driver's seat of our lives, an aspect of our minds which does not contain the idea of getting as completion.

Whatever you want to get: credentials, experiences, money, relationships, safety, security, beauty, health, enlightenment—none of these things will do anything but add to the sense of separation and make the dream real. They are all productions of ego, because only ego differs with what is.

The ego is the getter—the thing saying, "if only this, that, I were different." We put our hands on that hot stove again and again and again, eon after eon, thinking that this time, we won't get burned. And yet we feel an actual obligation to continue to do this. That sense of obligation is ego.

If, as A Course in Miracles, among others, says, the truth is that God did not create this world—that we are wrapped up in a bit of miscreational mind-confusion that never actually happened—then we have no obligation here other than, eventually, to see this fact—awaken to it—and in so doing shine that bit of light for others to remember and follow.

where the new age leaves off and a course in miracles begins

This morning I was reading an interview with Ken Wapnick that very succinctly explained a feeling of resistance I had been having lately towards ACIM. It had nothing to do with the course itself—it had to do solely with what is happening to the course in the hands of people who would turn it into a religion. There are factions now, and there is infighting, and there is all the usual craptastic ego activity that happens when people get together in groups and think they know more than other people about some subject in particular.

Here's a quote from that interview:
"As for why the ego so often rears its ugly head in Course circles, Ken waxes philosophical. “You should have been around thirty years ago,” he quips. “People don’t want to look at their own guilt; it’s easier to project it out. It’s like children in a sandbox. It’s been like that for thirty years with the Course and two thousand years with Christianity and it's in Judaism, it’s in Islam, it’s in every formal religion. That’s why it’s so much better not to see the Course as a religion, a movement, or anything like that. It’s just a spiritual teaching to heal your mind. If people used it like that you wouldn’t have groups fighting with groups and if you had a group you wouldn’t take it seriously, you’d just be people hanging around together like family or friends. It wouldn’t be taken as a thing with an expectation.
 
“Once you start to make something formal you get into churches and we all know what churches do,” he concludes. “Don’t play in the sandbox. You don’t attack it, you don’t judge it, but you don’t play in it. That’s the answer, I think.”

So I had been standing at the fringes of the sandbox, getting fed up with the behavior of the other children. I just had to turn around and walk out, get back to what was mine to study and mine to do. What others do in the sandbox is none of my business.

The other aspect of confusion and resistance I'd been experiencing had to do with something an old friend said one day about the Seth material. I cut my inner teeth on the Seth material back in the 70s. Seth was the first spiritual material I read that made sense to me. The first thing Seth does is to expose and begin to chip away at guilt in the mind. He unearths it and he lovingly eliminates it, layer by layer, without invoking any kind of religious overtone—without ever even using the word God.

Seth asks you to face the fact that your thoughts and beliefs are creating your reality—that there is no actual world outside of your own projections—and he explains it with great humor and kindness. He does this at what ACIM would call a 'low rung' of the ladder, in that he encourages the reader to experiment with examining and altering belief systems in order to have a better experience within the world. To my mind this is a very, very valuable step in the process.

What this old friend said, one day last year, has been festering in my mind since she said it. For various reasons I'm unable to contact her and discuss the matter with her, so I've been letting it just sit there on one of my inner shelves like a growing case of mold. She said, "I hate Seth."

We had been discussing her interest in popular American Buddhism, in Pema Chodron and in people like Eckhart Tolle. She was vehement in her expression of hatred, but when I asked her to explain, she became defensive and shut the conversation down completely.

She was, at one point, a very important person in my life, so I was of course curious as to why she would say what she did. In all likelihood, I have entirely misinterpreted what she meant, but it caused me to go back and look at some of the Seth material. It remains extremely relevant, although in some ways kind of quaint in its references to the cultural happenings of the 70s. It does not venture very far up the ladder (in ACIM terms) but it takes the lower rungs very thoroughly.

The truth is that we do have control over many aspects of our experience here in this dream. We can switch probabilities or scripts simply by shifting our thoughts. As the mind goes, so goes the experience. It's not just a matter of having a good attitude in a shitty situation—the actual situation does sometimes shift as a result of the shift in outlook. Your change of mind causes a different movie to appear on the screen, in a sense. Or you shift into a different theater. Whatever the metaphor, the goal is to eventually realize that instead of shifting from theater to theater, in search of a better, more pleasant, more abundant movie—there is another shift you can take.

You can get up and walk out of the theater altogether. You can stop worrying about love, money, health, the body, whatever the current obsession is, and you can look up and say, "I'm tired of this" and just have the guts to stop.

Stopping puts you into another, larger theater. Kind of like going from a little TV to a large IMAX. It's still a theater, but there is less of a feeling of control. The truth is, however, that there is STILL control. The choice is still yours, over and over, moment to moment, as to what appears as your reality. This is maybe what ACIM would call, "the happy dream." Still a dream.

Only in this dream, faith and trust play a huge role, because you are called upon to ignore appearances to a greater and greater degree. You choose DESPITE the evidence of the body's senses, so that the paradoxical choice becomes a familiar experience.