EXERCISE 1: clarify your experience of life.
Find a comfortable place where you can sit or lie down without distractions.
Think about the last time you went to sleep and woke up when you didn’t have or remember a dream whilst you were asleep.
If you're honest, you won’t remember the time that passed. You probably only remember falling asleep and waking up.
In between falling asleep and waking up, you don’t remember anything. So for you, nothing effectively happened, and you weren’t even aware of thoughts, emotions, or sensations.
Now think about where you are sitting or lying down.
Apart from the following three aspects of your experience of life, is there anything else happening?
- thoughts (words, images, and movies in your mind)
- emotions (or feelings you have).
- sensations (your 5 senses: seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling, and any bodily feelings such as shivering).
If you really think about it, apart from thoughts, emotions and some or all of the 5 sensations, nothing else is happening in your experience of life.
So when you are asleep and don’t remember being asleep, you are not aware of experiencing anything and when you are awake, you are aware of thoughts, emotions and sensations.
EXERCISE 2: clarify another’s experience of life:
Again, find a comfortable place where you can sit or lie down without distractions.
Think about the last few times time you met people.
If you think about their general behaviour, other people simply move, talk, express themselves in other ways, and you may describe the people as active, verbal or opinionated.
Whatever a person does and whatever your description is of them, what they are doing from moment to moment is behaving in the way you are describing.
A person has a behaviour and you describe the behaviour.
Summary
To summarise, you experience thoughts. emotions and sensations and you experience the behaviour of other people, animals, and in fact you experience the behaviour of the universe.
As I said in the information of this course, if you feel I’ve missed something, or would like anything clarified about exercises 1 and 2, then please let me know in the comments below.
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The actual reality of your life situations.